Ghosting (identity Theft) - General Description

General Description

Typically, identity theft is done for criminal financial gain, with the thief preying upon the credit rating of a living person who is an active member of society. The identity thief retains his own name and place in society while making unlawful use of someone else's more advantageous financial status. The so-called "identity thief" is really more interested in exploiting someone else's financial credit rather than acquiring that person's identity. In this sense, it is the creditors, not the person's family and friends, who are the primary victims of this crime.

The motives for ghosting are more complex. The ghoster is sincerely interested in acquiring another person's identity for his own ongoing use and therefore usually selects a person who is dead in order to avoid the risks that would occur if two living people used the same Social Security number. Generally, a ghoster is unwilling to sustain their existing identity and takes a new identity to get a fresh start in life. Unlike a typical identity thief, who squeezes quick profits from one stolen identity then moves on to the next victim, a ghoster may actively seek to acquire maintain a respectable credit rating in their new identity.

Ghosting is largely a phenomenon of the 20th century. Before the arrival of the Social Security system, a person who possessed no identity documents (no birth records, no high school diploma) could live openly without incurring suspicion. Counterfeit identification could not be easily exposed as fake. Only with the arrival of income tax and social benefits in the 1920s did it become essential for every adult to possess an identity that was registered in government archives -- if not their own lawful identity, then one appropriated from a person no longer using it. In the 21st century, advances in technology have made ghosting increasingly difficult to achieve, while governments have increased the penalties for those who get caught.

Dashiell Hammett's novel The Maltese Falcon (1930) recounts the story, apparently based on a true case, of a businessman named Flitcraft who spontaneously abandons his career and his marriage, abruptly moving to another city and inventing another identity. If this incident did indeed occur in the 1920s or earlier, Flitcraft would have encountered little difficulty in establishing a new life without formal documents such as a birth certificate and Social Security number. If this had occurred ten years later, Flitcraft would have needed a ghost identity to begin his new life.

In the days before computerized databases, ghosting was easy to achieve -- especially in Britain, where birth certificates and death certificates are public documents. The General Register Office in London contains indexed registers of all births, deaths, marriages and adoptions in England and Wales. The typical ghoster might consult the Deaths index (black volumes, archived by year) for the period 15 years after his own birth, seeking records of the death of a man approximately 15 years old (that is, whose birthdate would be near the birthdate of the ghoster). Finding a suitable candidate, the ghoster would then consult the Births index (red volumes, in a different section of the Records Office) for the deceased person's date of birth. Armed with this knowledge, he could then pay a small fee to obtain a copy of the deceased's birth certificate. Using this document as the foundation for his stolen identity, the ghoster would gradually acquire evidence enabling him to pass himself off as the other person, still alive. Some of this evidence would be faked, with other evidence, such as school records, having been legitimately issued to the deceased person before his death. Other archives outside of Britain, such as the genealogy records of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, have unwittingly served this same purpose of enabling ghosters to find new identities.

It is easier for a female to appropriate a dead person's identity than it is for a man. For instance, a female ghoster can steal the identity of a dead female who had married and taken her husband's name. Detection is more difficult in this case because the death certificate and the birth certificate will show two different surnames. Also, gaps in the ghost identity's employment history (for the years between the ghost's death and the date when the ghoster claims that identity) will arouse less suspicion if the impostor is a female, who might conceivably have spent the transition years as a homemaker with no wages.

In the 1970s, a counterculture publishing firm in California named Eden Press published a pamphlet, The Paper Trip, giving detailed instructions for acquiring a dead person's identity. Among other pointers, the pamphlet advised readers to search newspaper archives for old articles about an entire family getting killed in an accident while on vacation outside of their home state. This scenario offers several advantages to a ghoster:

• Because the incident involved multiple deaths, there are multiple candidates (of different ages, and both sexes) for an identity that the ghoster can steal.
• Because the entire family died in the same incident, the dead person whose identity is chosen for ghosting is not likely to have any immediate relatives who are still alive and aware of his death.
• Because the family died outside their home state, their birth records and death records are archived in two different states and are unlikely to be cross-referenced. Also, if the deceased family's remains were not returned to their home community for burial, the staffers in the local records office are unlikely to be aware that the family is deceased and will not be suspicious when someone claiming to be a member of this family requests a copy of his birth certificate.
• Because the deaths occurred years ago, new requests for an old birth certificate are unlikely to stir anyone's memory of that individual's death.

Whereas typical identity thieves will steal the credit rating of anyone, regardless of age, race or sex, a ghoster intends to live in the stolen identity and therefore usually seeks to acquire the identity of a dead person whose physical description strongly resembles the living ghoster's appearance: similar birthdate, height, sex, race or ethnic background. Rare exceptions are transexual ghosters (see below), who seek to acquire the identity of a dead person of the opposite sex but otherwise resemble the ghoster as much as possible.