Death Claim Scam - India

The death certificate of the owner of a private university made by fraudsters to claim Rs 10 crore insurance was not issued by life insurer, an initial police investigation has found. But while it appears to have settled this question, it has led to a more unsettling one — that the government portal for birth and death certificates was hacked and old documents were edited to change name, address and other details.

Since February this year, at least 15 instances of fake death certificates, including this one, have come to the notice of the authorities. Out of these, 13 death certificates were made. The attempt at pulling off the insurance scam was discovered earlier this week when a team from a leading insurance company visited the university owner’s house in South City 1 to verify his “death” and a claim of Rs 10 crore that had been filed in his wife’s name. 

The fraudsters had filed the claim using a fake death certificate and used a fake Aadhaar card to open a bank account in his wife’s name. The death certificate, a police officer said, was not procured from the corporation because there was no record of any application being filed in the university owner’s name or of the insurer issuing one. 

Every death and birth certificate, according to officials, has a unique QR code and serial number and all certificates issued by the civic body can be tracked with the QR codes in the archives. The process went online in 2018. The QR code, serial number and stamp are the same but name, age and address are different. Someone made changes in an existing certificate and took a print.

The QR code on the fake death certificate of the university owner submitted with the insurance company showed the name and address of the original person in whose name it was issued when scanned. 

The fraudsters, had accessed the portal by hacking the login credentials of the registrar, who also has access to the archives as head of the department. The system gives an edit option to authorized persons to make corrections.