25%
Better estate recovery
0
Compliance violations
24/7
Monitoring
2,500+
Sources
The risks of collecting on deceased accounts
Every call to a deceased debtor's family is a potential complaint, lawsuit, and reputation hit.
FDCPA Violations
Collecting on deceased accounts breaks FDCPA rules. You face penalties and lawsuits.
Grieving Family Complaints
Calls to grieving families trigger complaints. Your reputation suffers. Clients leave.
Missed Estate Claims
Late notification means missed estate claim windows. You lose recovery opportunities.
Why collection agencies choose ObituaryMonitor
Protect your agency, maintain compliance, and improve estate recovery rates.
Immediate Account Flagging
Get alerts when debtors pass away. Stop calls right away. Never contact grieving families by accident.
FDCPA Compliance Protection
Collecting on deceased accounts risks FDCPA violations. Our monitoring keeps you compliant automatically.
Smooth Estate Transition
Learn about deaths early. File estate claims while records are fresh. Recover more from valid debts.
Reputation Protection
Calling deceased families hurts your reputation. Clients lose trust. Our alerts prevent these costly mistakes.
Built for collection workflows
- Monitor debtor portfolios via CSV upload
- Real-time obituary notifications
- Integration with collection management systems
- Estate contact information from obituaries
- Audit trail for compliance documentation
- Bulk monitoring at scale
Jennifer L.
Collections Manager, National Recovery
"ObituaryMonitor is now part of our standard process. It eliminated inappropriate contacts with grieving families and actually improved our estate recovery rates by 25%."
Understanding FDCPA Requirements for Deceased Debtors
The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act establishes strict requirements for how debt collectors must interact with consumers and their families. While the FDCPA does not explicitly prohibit collection on deceased debts, it does require that collectors cease communication with deceased individuals and carefully navigate interactions with surviving family members. Continuing to send collection letters or make calls to a deceased person can be considered harassment of the family and may violate the FDCPA's prohibition on unfair or deceptive practices.
More importantly from a practical standpoint, collection attempts on deceased individuals waste resources and damage client relationships. Every call made to a grieving family is a potential complaint that can escalate to regulatory action or public relations damage. The reputational cost of being known as the agency that harasses grieving families far exceeds any potential recovery from continued collection attempts. Modern agencies recognize that proactive death monitoring is not just a compliance measure but a fundamental business protection.
Beyond stopping inappropriate collection, early death notification enables agencies to transition effectively to estate claim processes. Most estates have statutory deadlines for creditor claims, and missing these deadlines can result in complete loss of recovery opportunity. By identifying deaths within days rather than weeks or months, agencies can file claims while estates are still in administration, significantly improving recovery rates on accounts that would otherwise be written off entirely.
ObituaryMonitor provides the technology infrastructure for this proactive approach to deceased debtor management. Our system monitors over two thousand five hundred obituary sources across all fifty states, delivering high-confidence matches within hours of obituary publication. Integration with existing collection management systems enables automatic account flagging and workflow triggers, ensuring that identified deaths immediately impact collection activity without requiring manual intervention.
Compliance-Ready Documentation
Every alert comes with timestamped documentation you can use to demonstrate due diligence. Show regulators and clients that your agency takes compliance seriously with audit trails that prove you had systems in place to identify deceased debtors and ceased collection appropriately.
Implementing Deceased Debtor Monitoring
Integrating obituary monitoring into your collection workflow starts with uploading your active debtor portfolio. Our bulk import feature accepts CSV files containing debtor names, locations, and approximate ages. The more identifying information you provide, the more accurate our matching becomes. Most agencies upload their entire active portfolio and set up weekly or monthly refreshes to add new accounts.
Once accounts are loaded, our system continuously monitors over 2,500 obituary sources across all fifty states. When a potential match is found, we apply multi-factor verification including name matching, location proximity, and age correlation. Only matches exceeding our 90% confidence threshold trigger notifications, minimizing false positives that would waste your time reviewing incorrect matches.
Notifications can be delivered via email, SMS, or directly to your collection management system through our API. Each notification includes the obituary source, publication date, and enough detail to verify the match against your account records. The audit trail documents when the death was detected and when your agency received notification, providing evidence of timely response for compliance purposes.
For agencies with estate recovery programs, the obituary information also provides a starting point for identifying surviving family members and funeral homes that may have estate contact information. This enables faster transition from collection to estate claim filing, improving recovery rates on accounts that would otherwise be written off. The combination of compliance protection and estate recovery improvement makes obituary monitoring a high-ROI investment for collection operations of any size.
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