Entrustet Digital Property Search: Find online accounts of deceased people
By Nathan Lustig on Mar 16 th, with 1 COMMENT
Previously, we’ve focused on protecting digital assets of living people with our Account Guardian, which lets you make a list of all of your digital assets and decide which should be deleted and which should be transferred when you pass away. But what about the 55 million people on the planet who die each year without having planned for their digital assets? We realized we could help them too.
Survivors of deceased people provide us with the deceased’s email address(es) and our system automatically scour the internet for online accounts and digital property. We’re launching with over 50 online services and are adding more each day. After the search, we generate a report that shows all of the digital property we’ve found. The report also provides comprehensive descriptions of each company’s policy for transferring and deleting digital assets, along with the contact person and any other important information we’ve found out about each company. Our step-by-step instructions make it easy for anyone to deal with a deceased person’s digital assets quickly and easily, rather than having to search through the FAQs and TOS’s.
We’ve been testing the Entrustet Digital Property Search for about six weeks with our attorney partners and have found hundreds of online accounts that would have otherwise been lost. For example, we recently ran a digital property report for the family of a 42 year old who passed away suddenly. His family knew he was an active online user, but did not know which specific services he used. Our report found 16 online accounts that otherwise would have been lost, including a business domain name that was set to expire in 30 days. The family was able to avoid stress and the possibility of losing the domain name because we provided them with the actionable information they needed to help settle the estate.
And it’s not just for young people who pass away before their time. We’ve found online accounts for people as old as 75. Feedback from attorneys tells us that it’s also beneficial even if a report returns no matches. This way, the attorney or personal representative can be sure that they didn’t overlook something important, and families know that the deceased person did not have any online accounts.
We charge $300 per Digital Property Search and search up to three email addresses per report. Entrustet certified partner attorneys receive a $50 discount and can run searches for $250. Partner attorneys are listed on our Entrustet Lawyer Directory and currently use Entrustet’s Account Guardian to help their clients protect their digital assets while they are still alive. If you’d like more information about Entrustet Digital Property Searches, check out our information page or drop us a line at info@entrustet.com.
March 17, 2011 at 5:54 pm, entreprecurious said:
RT @Entrustet: Check out our new service: Digital Property Reports http://ow.ly/4gDxd