A mature goal for identity thieves: prisoners in the death cell

Fraudsters earn money by stealing the identity of some of the most isolated people in the United States: occupants in the death cell.

In a report published on Monday by the identity review company Sentlink, Sentlink finds that ongoing fraud operates requires the identity of inmates that are intended for the execution in the state of Texas to build up loans and steal money from lenders.

The identities are used in so-called “bust-out” traud in which criminal identities steal or fake identities to build loans with a financial institution, sometimes over a period of months or even years, then quickly spend a credit or credit card feed and disappear with the money. The credit report Transunion estimated in February that the bast-out fraud now cost the banking industry $ 1 billion a year.

The fraud that began in March 2023 seems to exploit the fact that inmates in the death cell are largely cut off by the outside world, which probably does not draw attention to the fact that credit cards or companies were opened on their behalf.

“You would not receive any text or e -mail notifications from a financial institution,” said Robin Maher, the executive director of the death penalty information center in Washington, DC, non -profit. “Most prisoners are in need and only have a few, if at all, financial resources.”

The Texas Ministry of Public Security did not answer a request for a comment.

Identity theft and fraud have increased steadily for years. Complaints on the Federal Trade Commission have escalated almost every year since the agency was persecuted and received a record of 6.5 million claims in 2024.

David Maimon, Sentillink's head of knowledge of fraud, found the phenomenon after examining a tip in which an identity fraud used the name of a prisoner in the death cell. He looked for curious in the online database of the inmates of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to carry them out, and compared them to Sentillink data for names that were used in identity fraud. Almost 10% of the 172 people on the Texas list were identity theft sacrifices, he found.

While some criminal artificial intelligence is used to create fake identities for bast-out frauds, it is more difficult to catch fraudsters who pretend to be existing people, Maimon told NBC News.

“There are public records and history around them,” he said. “These boys went to school. They had an account with Best Buy. We saw them here. We saw them there.”

Maimon noted that the program requires patience from fraudsters who can spend months before we have merged with a committee.

“You open a bank account, you ask for a credit line. You pay the credit line on time. Then increase the limit and pay further. At some point you will disappear with $ 50,000, $ 100,000. It is time-consuming operation, but the payment is quite high in the end.”

The identity of the fraudsters is unknown, although Maimon is of the opinion that the fraud in Texas is sufficient a pattern to probably be a single operation. Bust-out fraud sometimes includes the physical classification in a bank under the guise of a stolen identity.

While the identities of the deaths were previously exploited, most of Maimon who have been found seem to come from Texas, which points out that the perpetrator probably lives there. According to statistics of the death penalty, Texas has one of the highest number of prisoners in the death cell.

In most cases, the fraudsters opened bank accounts and credit cards in the name of the occupants. In some others they also registered fake companies in their names. In June 2023, for example, fraudsters created a fake landscape design Business in Arlington, Texas, in the name of Ronald Haskell, who has been detained since 2014 and was sentenced to death in 2019 for murder of six people.

A relative of Haskells said NBC News that they were not made aware of the fraud. They refused to continue commenting.