Death Row inmates are unlikely to receive communications that would alert them to identity theft.

Scammers are making money by stealing the identities of some of the most isolated people in the U.S.: inmates on death row.

Key Points:

  • The identities are used in so-called “bust out” scams, where criminals steal or fake identities in order to build credit with a financial institution, sometimes over a period of months or even years, then quickly max out a loan or credit card advance and disappear with the money.

  • The scam, which started in March 2023, appears to exploit the fact that inmates on death row are largely cut off from the outside world, making them unlikely to see correspondence that might alert them to the fact that credit cards or businesses were opened in their name.

  • In most of these cases, the fraudsters opened bank accounts and credit cards in the inmates’ names. In some others, they also registered fake businesses in their names. In June 2023, for instance, scammers created a fake landscaping business in Arlington, Texas, in the name of Ronald Haskell, who has been incarcerated since 2014 and was sentenced to death in 2019 for killing six people.