Generally people ghost for credit theft and have a malicious intent however this thread has nothing to do with this, it has to do with starting anew as someone else. Even though the person is deceased it is still SERIOUS crime, although victimless.
The method is as follows, find someone who died about your age or would be your age now, who died in a different state than they were born in (most state vital records are now computerized and cross reference deaths and births. However they only do so within that particular state), same gender, with average American name or a name that wouldn't be obviously not true to your race/ethnicity. You then cross reference that person's name and date of birth and date death with the SOCIAL SECURITY DEATH INDEX (MASTER DEATH FILE which is free online btw) to see if anyone has reported that person deceased with social security. If their name is not listed, then SOCIAL SECURITY most likely has not been officially notified of the person's death. However, if the person has recently passed away, it can take anywhere from 3-6 months for SOCIAL SECURITY to process the information, which could explain why their name is not listed. You then preform a credit check on that person, and background check. Generally one of the online companies such as people smart, or intellus, with good review ratings will do the job. Most states have online criminal records and while online background checks aren't the most ideal method they do a pretty good job, and short of going to each county and each state where that person lived and searching each ones files that's as good as your going to get, unless you want to hire a private investigator. Then you get that persons certified birth certificate, and social security number. Now once you have that in order to get a driver's license/state ID you need an SSN, Certified birth certificate, proof of residency in that state, and whatever secondary documents required by that particular state, let's say certified HS/College transcripts, HS/college diploma, a baptismal certificate, a voters registration card, an insurance card, a personalized debit card, etc. Now you would have an identity with no criminal record to the best of your knowledge, decent or no credit, a certified birth certificate, a valid yet dormant social security number matching the name and DOB(cause the persons dead), and some supporting documents.
Now here is the real bitch, while this SHOULD be enough to pass, there are articles about people getting busted doing this, but for passport fraud. Apparently the state department (agency that issues passports in the U.S.) has busted several hundred people this way for passport fraud, using dead person's identities to get a passport. What they did was made a program of some sort, and cross reference the passport holder's information with each of the 50 individual states vital records death records and found several hundred matches. If you want to hear more info, GOOGLE Operation Death Match.
Now there are also people who have successfully done this and gotten away with this, for obvious reason you never hear about them... Also with facial recognition, people are getting busted in all states for duplicate licenses under different names. One article in particular is in New Jersey where people got busted with 3-4 different identities!!!! One guy used a dead persons documents and ACTUALLY received a REAL authentic driver's license from Jersey!!!! Now these people would have gotten away with it if they went to a different state to obtain an ID, because facial recognition is only run within each state. In other words if you had a license in NJ, and a license in NY, NJ would never know because they don't run facial recognition with NY, at least not yet anyway.
However, the question remains say you had all the documents you needed to do this for example, would the DMV be able to figure out you are using a dead person's identity documents, would the IRS or SOCIAL SECURITY??? It's highly unlikely that the DMV for each state runs peoples documents against 50 states death records for EVERY person that walks in there unlikely to have that kind of man power. Reason for the question, is its highly doubtful that the IRS runs 300+million tax returns through the passport fraud system, unlikely. And if social security was never notified that that individual was dead, one would imagine they wouldn't find out either. It appears that the only people who have gotten caught, were those applying for passports, and they actually received them!! However, several months-years later they got caught and went to federal prison! Nonetheless, if someone had a legitimate reason to do this, does anyone think that the IRS or social security would find out?? This seems to be a popular method, and to be quite honest, it's very unlikely someone who did this would get caught, unless they were to apply for a passport. This truly is a victimless crime, since the individual that is having their identity stolen is deceased!
stop fucking spamming this sub with your shit