Entrustet Digital Property Search Case Study #2
By Nathan Lustig on Apr 25 th, with 1 COMMENT
We launched our Digital Property Search service about a month ago and have gotten a great response from the legal community. Our searches help people find, access and transfer online accounts when someone dies and has not made a plan before they died. All we need is an email address and we search the internet for the deceased online accounts. We give the family or attorney a list of all of the deceased’s digital assets, along with detailed instructions on how to access, transfer or delete each specific account. In our first case study, we were able to find 14 online accounts of a recently deceased 42 year old, including a business domain name that was set to expire within 60 days. Check back for more case studies in the next weeks to see how people are using Entrustet Digital Property Reports to help their clients find digital assets that otherwise would have been lost.
Client: Female, age 63
Accounts Found: (8) Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, Google, Kodak Gallery, PayPal, Skype
Other stuff found: Professional reviews on 2 separate health care sites
Highlights:
We found eight online accounts that otherwise would have been lost, including social networking, photo sharing and financial accounts.
First, we found a paypal account that was used to buy and sell items online. Paypal accounts can contain a balance that the family would be able to access. Additionally, closing a paypal account of a deceased person reduces the chance that the account could be hacked by a fraudster who would try to steal from the recently deceased. This phenomenon is called Ghosting.
Second, we found digital photos stored on Kodak Gallery. Digital photos are one of the most sentimentially valuable digital assets and can easily be lost without knowing where they are stored.
Third, we found an active Facebook account that the family could decide to memorialize or delete. The vast majority of people do not know that Facebook accounts can be memorialized, so it’s a big help for the family to have a link to the policy, along with the step by step instructions we provide on how to actually delete or memorialize the account.
Our digital property reports take names and email addresses of deceased people and search the web to find their online accounts. We search over 50 of the most popular websites on the internet and return a report detailing the deceased’s digital property. Attorneys, executors or the family of a recently deceased may run a digital property report by providing us with the deceased’s name and email address(es).
We’ve been running digital property searches for our partner attorneys for the past month and will be continuing to release case studies over the next few weeks. If you’d like more information on a case study or need to run your own, let us know!
May 10, 2011 at 4:24 pm, Virtual Property Search: Find Online Accounts of Deceased People said:
[...] search the internet for the virtual property of deceased people. We’ve run two digital property report case studies and published the results to our blog. Our virtual property searches do a search of the internet [...]