The Story of Louis Taylor

Undoing the damage to a loved one's name

February 2010


Louis Taylor died of natural causes in 2002. He was 78. In 2009, he applied for a job. 

That’s what a woman claimed, anyway, when she called Taylor’s widow asking for more information about him. An hour later, another person called with questions about Louis’s college application.

Taylor’s widow explained that Louis was deceased. “Someone has played a dirty trick on him,” the would-be employer said. Despite that Louis Taylor had passed away seven years ago, within two days, his widow received phone calls from eight different people trying to pry information from her about her deceased husband.

“I was really angry,” says Dan Taylor, 59, Louis’s son. “I wanted to find out who these people are.”

Someone was trying to “ghost” Louis Taylor. Ghosting involves stealing the identity of a deceased person, often for financial gain. In this case, the identity thief already had Louis Taylor’s name, home address and phone number. All he or she needed was one more piece of information – a Social Security number, or perhaps a credit card number – to apply for credit in Taylor’s name and start making fraudulent purchases.

That’s why the scammers posed as employers or university officials, Dan Taylor believes. With the widow on the phone, the thieves could pretend to be innocent bystanders, claiming that some unknown third party had applied for a job using the deceased person’s information. The widow simply needed to provide the correct information so the employer could verify their records.

Even more suspicious: Calls from multiple schools and employers all came from the same Missouri telephone number.

“My mom was quite upset that someone was calling for my dad saying he had applied for a job,” Taylor says. Confronting the elusive thieves proved difficult, however. When Taylor took the phone from his mother to demand answers, the callers hung up. Taylor tracked many of the calls to a phone in Missouri, but could not determine which phone company serviced the line.

Meanwhile, Taylor’s concerns only grew. If the thieves managed to obtain that one additional piece of data, it could ruin his mother’s credit rating and her ability to use her credit cards. To protect her, Taylor called all three credit bureaus and informed them of his father’s death. He asked them to lock down his father’s Social Security number and close all the credit accounts in his father’s name. He also placed a freeze on his mother’s credit cards that only she can lift if she ever needs to make a purchase.

Now Dan Taylor, his mother’s finances, and his father’s name are all protected from ghosting identity thieves. But that hasn’t stopped the thieves from trying. Once or twice a week, Louis Taylor’s widow still receives calls asking about her husband.

“My mother is savvy enough to hang up on them,” says Taylor. “It’s very surprising to me that this is happening seven years after my father passed away.”