Lovely. Gives the con men up to seven days to ply their nefarious trade.

... Steve Jobs given his repeated habit of dying

It would seem the obituary page needs to be encrypted.

(ok ok it is actually nice to see information security being thought of for a change)

... the next instance of password protected excel files being lost in transit?

Mine's the one with share certifcates in manufacturers of CD-Rs and Jiffy Bags in the pocket.

But it didn't stop Amex sending an unsolicited credit card to a name I made up for a third party online survey, whose name they then flogged to Amex, who then decided that he must be worthy of a credit card, even though he DOESN'T EXIST!!

Pleeeease let's not have these as encrypted spreadsheets that could get 'lost'/made public once decrypted - too simplistic and prey to the CD/memory stick scenario.

Better to have some mechanism that could update the agencies' systems in a secure manner - e.g. agency sends encrypted (new key each month !) name/DOB/temporary record ID list to registrar's office, office sends back (encrypted) record ID of records to be updated.

Or something better that someone PAID to be good at such things has come up with - Schneier or Anderson for example.

... someone presses the wrong key or mis-spells a name and some poor (but perfectly alive) sod finds that his credit cards have all been cancelled because "the computer says you're dead"!

If someone takes the identity of a dead person, is it illegal to kill them since technically they are already dead?

Quote - "But it didn't stop Amex sending an unsolicited credit card to a name I made up for a third party online survey, whose name they then flogged to Amex, who then decided that he must be worthy of a credit card, even though he DOESN'T EXIST!"

Where was this online survey? I coul ddo with a few credit cards, particularly in names of people who don't exist ;)

Isn't this just a way for them to measure how many people they have drove to suicide with their demands for repayment?

Back in the day when credit cards didn't exist, if you didn't have the money to pay for somthing you didn't have it - simple as.

These companies make me sick. They are directly responsible for the trillion pounds of consumer debt in this country, with little hope of getting it all back so they will screw up the ecomomy even more than it is now...