Scammers are making money by stealing the identities of some of the most isolated people in the U.S.: inmates on death row.
A report published Monday by the identity verification company SentiLink finds that an ongoing scam operation takes the identities of inmates slated for execution in the state of Texas in order to build credit and steal money from lenders.
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. Credit reporting company TransUnion estimated in Febru that bust-out scams now cost the banking industry $1 billion a year.
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.
“They wouldn’t receive text or email alerts from a financial institution,” said Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit. “Most prisoners are indigent and have few, if any, financial resources.”
The Texas Department of Public Safety did not respond to a request for comment.
Identity theft and fraud have steadily risen for years. Complaints to the Federal Trade Commission have escalated almost every year since the agency began tracking them in 2001, and it received a record 6.5 million claims in 2024.
David Maimon, SentiLink’s head of fraud insight, found the phenomenon after investigating a tip where an identity fraud case used the name of a prisoner on death row. Curious, he searched the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s online database of inmates to be executed and compared it with SentiLink’s data for names used in identity fraud scams. Nearly 10% of the 172 people on the Texas list had become identity theft victims, he found.
While some criminals are moving to using artificial intelligence to create fake identities for bust-out scams, it’s harder to catch scammers pretending to be existing people, Maimon told NBC News.
“There are public records and history around them,” he said. “These guys went to school. They had an account at Best Buy. We’ve seen them here. We’ve seen them there.”
Maimon noted that the scheme requires patience from scammers, who can spend months building credit before cashing out.
“They open a bank account, they ask for a credit line. They pay the credit line on time. Then they increase the limit, continue to pay. At some point, they disappear with $50,000, $100,000 or more. It’s a time-consuming operation, but the payoff is quite high at the end.”
The identity of the scammers is unknown, though Maimon believes that the Texas fraud follows enough of a pattern to likely be a single operation. Bust-out scams sometimes involve physically going into a bank under the guise of a stolen identity.
While death row inmates’ identities have been exploited before, most of the ones Maimon found appear to be from Texas, indicating that the perpetrator likely lives there. Texas has one of the highest numbers of prisoners on death row, according to Death Penalty Information Center statistics.
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.
A relative of Haskell’s told NBC News they had not been made aware of the scam. They declined to comment further.
