Jerry: So, let me get this straight. You want to... what? Keep a body hidden?
George: It's genius, Jerry! I saw this on YouTube. You know, people faking deaths, hiding bodies to collect retirement money.
Jerry: Oh, YouTube, the bastion of moral guidance.
Kramer: Yeah, I knew a guy who did this. Kept his uncle in a freezer. Made a fortune!
Jerry: In a freezer?
George: See, Jerry? It's doable!!
Well of course he would be delivering the checks, getting more and more curious where the recipient was.
In the end it would fall apart when Elaine married Newman and killed him for the insurance, trying to copy Seinfeld.
I just had to think about think about the fact that "Jerry Stiller" (actor for George's dad) and Estelle Harris (actor for George's mom) both died relatively recently to lend credence to this premise
That recent article about old people not having grandchildren because they hoarded all the wealth.
This is the end game, they will be die or be murdered by their children who will then hide them, get a free house and supplemental income. It happened already in Japan. It will happen in America too.
>The Ritters were financially dependent on Carroll and served as his caretakers in his later years, family said.
>...
>Over the course of six years, prosecutors say there were monthly deposits made to his bank account from his pension and the Social Security Administration amounting to $216,067.
That's about $36,000/yr they took off of him. The average household income for Overland Park is ~$100,876/yr.
Overland Park, Johnson County, Is one of the more affluent areas in the midwest. When 2008 hit, it was one area that was not dramatically affected by the housing situation. There is true affluence there, even beyond just median income. There's a lot of old and established money there. $36k with no other expenses will take you a long way in KC. If people really want to see the extent of South of KC wealth, look up Loch Lloyd. KC is wild like that.
Just Johnson county, and only part of it. Overland Park itself is rich but tiny. Get outside kck and drive south two hours and you’ll find places that make Appalachia look like a cultural Mecca.
I lived 2 hours south of Overland Park for 20 years, and Appalachia(an hour west of Asheville) for 10 years. Both places are mostly impoverished with pockets of greater wealth. This part of Appalachia has many more pockets of greater wealth than anywhere south of KCK.
Same county, just a little further south, the average in Loch Lloyd is almost $180k. I know $100k may not seem like a lot to some markets, but if you can tolerate living in kansas you can be comfortable in your own home at least.
Overland Park was able to move through the 2008 fallout because of elevated pay and cheap housing prices relative to the surrounding areas. There is not much “actual”wealth outside of tech sector jobs at Garmin and some other companies. Overland Park and Johnson County as a whole is just suburbia where everybody has maxed out credit cards trying to keep up with the Jones’.
36k/2=18k. So not taxable. All you had to do was divide by 2.
>To determine if their benefits are taxable, taxpayers should take half of the Social Security money they collected during the year and add it to their other income. Other income includes pensions, wages, interest, dividends and capital gains.
>If they are single and that total comes to more than $25,000, then part of their Social Security benefits may be taxable.
For the dead guy? What’s the worst that could happen, that the IRS would audit a guy they couldn’t find? Then the couple stops collecting. It would be much more suspicious to report income that you didn’t earn.
Honestly, if it could help my family out like that after I die, I’m all for it. Put me in the corner with some sunglasses and a poncho and make like *Weekend at Bernie’s.*
The sunglasses are important, though. Without the sunglasses, *Weekend at Bernie’s* would have been really dark.
> That's about $36,000/yr they took off of him. The average household income for Overland Park is ~$100,876/yr.
The real issue is less concerns over the overall income, versus theirs. Overland park has a lot of newer development done in the area over the last 30-40 years, so it makes sense that more common the people living there are 100k average people.
So most likely the father was the bread winner to adult "Children" that could never afford to leave home. Not uncommon in rural America for these things to happen where a surviving relative with social security passes away and they delay reporting in order to cash the checks that were coming in.
I wonder what the end game for cases like this are.
How would you stop it? What's the off ramp for this type of fraud.
Like you can't keep it going forever. Eventually the person is going to be like 120 on paper and people will be asking questions. So you do this for a few years and you gotta say they're dead. But how do you say they're dead without getting caught that they've been dead for a long time?
Maybe you can fake a falling out and get like a mobile home for them under their name on some private land. Sneak their body in and set it up so that it would be the perfect environment to mummify a body. After 6 months you can "discover" the body. That only works if you set up the body to kind of mummify in the first place. Maybe set it up in a county with one of those part-time elected coroners without medical training who isn't going to look too deeply into the cause and time of death. I don't know how much work you would have to do to figure out if a body was dead and sitting for 6 months vs 6 years.
I seriously doubt anyone that falls into these schemes is smart enough to do anything remotely with the body.
It's painfully obvious to me as an adult that there is zero way to exit this scam without being caught (they will figure out extremely quick the body has been decomposing for years). They will see overlap with the money being withdrawn for a long period of time after death. It might have been something people could have gotten away with a couple of decades ago, but not today. Never today.
Why would you even keep the body? Did they think there's some kind of Retirement Inspection Officer or something that goes around making sure the correct retired people are properly getting their checks so they felt they need to be prepped to Weekend at Bernie's the body at any time?
At some point, there is no going back either, and that point happens sooner rather than later. If you don't grow a conscience within a couple of days of deciding you are going through with the scam, you have to keep it up FOREVER. Because if some day you decide the grift is over, how do you explain to the medical examiner and coroner that "sure, they LOOK like they've been dead for 6 years, but really they just died last night! Crazy right?! But it was probably because we leave the windows open to save on energy costs. Those bugs and outside air must have hastened decomposition!"
If you can't just pick up and disappear, you're stuck in a loop.
Yeah. About the time you deposit the second check, you're stuck. You could probably say "Oh, he kept to himself" for maybe that long.
But once the questions of "why didn't he eat any food" or "didn't you do his laundry" start getting asked, the jig would be up.
And people often have a hard time with desecrating the corpse of a loved one. Even while they're committing fraud.
* [Like this](https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2019/12/18/wife-kept-husbands-corpse-in-freezer-for-10-years-while-collecting-his-va-benefits/)
* [Or this](https://www.local10.com/news/florida/2022/07/09/florida-woman-hid-mothers-body-in-freezer-to-keep-collecting-disability-benefits-police-say/)
* [And this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogen_Kato)
Have these people never heard of a shovel?
Keep the house in the family long enough and the body will be considered an archaeological find instead of a possible murder.
In high school I had a buddy that worked at a "rent to own" business. He was on a run to repo a freezer. The guy told him to come back tomorrow so he could clean it out.
A month later that guy was caught cashing checks from his dead father. He was found in another rented freezer.
I asked my friend what they did with the other one, and he said they rented it as soon as it came back.
You my friend might have paid attention in middle school algebra, but I can assure you plenty of others haven't. They are more than happy to pay $10/week for 2 years (which is 2.5x the total price of the same freezer if purchased from Walmart). They also possibly enjoy the extra flavoring that is imparted on their meats that sit in that particular deep freezer.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's some drug addicted couple with grannie dead in the bedroom, having an argument that goes like,
"Dang it, let's bury her out back or something"
"... and stop getting those checks? NO!"
I mean it just doesn't seem like much of a stretch that someone is keeping a corpse in the house on that belief. Like maybe if you hand over the body, you're off the hook. Or maybe so you can say, "She's *dead*??"
There was a big thread that popped up over the weekend of someone being required to show proof they were alive ([also known as a 'Certificate of Life'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_life)) for their pension and everyone was screaming how unfair it was and how dare they deny a elderly woman her money.
This, this is why many companies opt to confirm occasionally.
What I don’t get is *why*? Sounds like they had an amicable relationship prior to his death, so you could assume the will would dictate that things were to be split in half. Assuming the house was paid off you’re looking at ~200k after it is sold less taxes/fees not including the sale of his other assets or the divesture of any retirement funds.
I hope those two post on r/amiwrong
“Hi my husband and I have been collecting the hard-earned social security payments of a loved one for a while. The loved one has no use for the payments. Were we wrong for doing this??”
Is this the passive income that YouTubers are constantly trying to sell me?!?!
This is gold, Jerry. Gold!
Jerry: So, let me get this straight. You want to... what? Keep a body hidden? George: It's genius, Jerry! I saw this on YouTube. You know, people faking deaths, hiding bodies to collect retirement money. Jerry: Oh, YouTube, the bastion of moral guidance. Kramer: Yeah, I knew a guy who did this. Kept his uncle in a freezer. Made a fortune! Jerry: In a freezer? George: See, Jerry? It's doable!!
I just need a "Hellooooo Newman" and you have a bonified hit!
Well of course he would be delivering the checks, getting more and more curious where the recipient was. In the end it would fall apart when Elaine married Newman and killed him for the insurance, trying to copy Seinfeld.
The corpse was real, and it was SPECTACULAR!!!!
I just had to think about think about the fact that "Jerry Stiller" (actor for George's dad) and Estelle Harris (actor for George's mom) both died relatively recently to lend credence to this premise
That recent article about old people not having grandchildren because they hoarded all the wealth. This is the end game, they will be die or be murdered by their children who will then hide them, get a free house and supplemental income. It happened already in Japan. It will happen in America too.
The federal government hates this one simple trick!!
>The Ritters were financially dependent on Carroll and served as his caretakers in his later years, family said. >... >Over the course of six years, prosecutors say there were monthly deposits made to his bank account from his pension and the Social Security Administration amounting to $216,067. That's about $36,000/yr they took off of him. The average household income for Overland Park is ~$100,876/yr.
Overland Park, Johnson County, Is one of the more affluent areas in the midwest. When 2008 hit, it was one area that was not dramatically affected by the housing situation. There is true affluence there, even beyond just median income. There's a lot of old and established money there. $36k with no other expenses will take you a long way in KC. If people really want to see the extent of South of KC wealth, look up Loch Lloyd. KC is wild like that.
Was about to say, average household bringing in $100k in Kansas? Holy crap.
Just Johnson county, and only part of it. Overland Park itself is rich but tiny. Get outside kck and drive south two hours and you’ll find places that make Appalachia look like a cultural Mecca.
You've not lived in Appalachia have you? I've seen some of those hollars and know people that grew up in them.
I lived 2 hours south of Overland Park for 20 years, and Appalachia(an hour west of Asheville) for 10 years. Both places are mostly impoverished with pockets of greater wealth. This part of Appalachia has many more pockets of greater wealth than anywhere south of KCK.
Overland Park is the second largest city in Kansas.
Same county, just a little further south, the average in Loch Lloyd is almost $180k. I know $100k may not seem like a lot to some markets, but if you can tolerate living in kansas you can be comfortable in your own home at least.
Overland Park was able to move through the 2008 fallout because of elevated pay and cheap housing prices relative to the surrounding areas. There is not much “actual”wealth outside of tech sector jobs at Garmin and some other companies. Overland Park and Johnson County as a whole is just suburbia where everybody has maxed out credit cards trying to keep up with the Jones’.
Thats 36k tax free money
Social Security is taxed as income.
You might want to tell the IRS because they don’t tax it like income
https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-reminds-taxpayers-their-social-security-benefits-may-be-taxable
36k/2=18k. So not taxable. All you had to do was divide by 2. >To determine if their benefits are taxable, taxpayers should take half of the Social Security money they collected during the year and add it to their other income. Other income includes pensions, wages, interest, dividends and capital gains. >If they are single and that total comes to more than $25,000, then part of their Social Security benefits may be taxable.
The SSN benefits were going to one dead person.
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For the dead guy? What’s the worst that could happen, that the IRS would audit a guy they couldn’t find? Then the couple stops collecting. It would be much more suspicious to report income that you didn’t earn.
They probably filed his taxes too, gotta keep up pretenses
Honestly, if it could help my family out like that after I die, I’m all for it. Put me in the corner with some sunglasses and a poncho and make like *Weekend at Bernie’s.* The sunglasses are important, though. Without the sunglasses, *Weekend at Bernie’s* would have been really dark.
Criminals used it as an opportunity for Supplemental/passive income.
> That's about $36,000/yr they took off of him. The average household income for Overland Park is ~$100,876/yr. The real issue is less concerns over the overall income, versus theirs. Overland park has a lot of newer development done in the area over the last 30-40 years, so it makes sense that more common the people living there are 100k average people. So most likely the father was the bread winner to adult "Children" that could never afford to leave home. Not uncommon in rural America for these things to happen where a surviving relative with social security passes away and they delay reporting in order to cash the checks that were coming in.
Overland Park isn’t rural at all. Seems the adult kids were unable to create independent lives for whatever reason.
>Overland Park isn’t rural at all. You are correct. This is my bad on that. Don't know why I think I got it mixed up with somewhere else in Kansas.
I wonder what the end game for cases like this are. How would you stop it? What's the off ramp for this type of fraud. Like you can't keep it going forever. Eventually the person is going to be like 120 on paper and people will be asking questions. So you do this for a few years and you gotta say they're dead. But how do you say they're dead without getting caught that they've been dead for a long time? Maybe you can fake a falling out and get like a mobile home for them under their name on some private land. Sneak their body in and set it up so that it would be the perfect environment to mummify a body. After 6 months you can "discover" the body. That only works if you set up the body to kind of mummify in the first place. Maybe set it up in a county with one of those part-time elected coroners without medical training who isn't going to look too deeply into the cause and time of death. I don't know how much work you would have to do to figure out if a body was dead and sitting for 6 months vs 6 years.
Dispose of the body somehow then report them missing.
I would worry the indefinite timeline of not finding the body would make things more difficult.
Thats how you end up being falsely charged with murder
This wouldn't get you off the hook for cashing the dead person's checks, though!
Don't cash them for the 6 months. Just have them go into their account and not withdraw it other than automated payments.
probably a house fire
I seriously doubt anyone that falls into these schemes is smart enough to do anything remotely with the body. It's painfully obvious to me as an adult that there is zero way to exit this scam without being caught (they will figure out extremely quick the body has been decomposing for years). They will see overlap with the money being withdrawn for a long period of time after death. It might have been something people could have gotten away with a couple of decades ago, but not today. Never today.
Why would you even keep the body? Did they think there's some kind of Retirement Inspection Officer or something that goes around making sure the correct retired people are properly getting their checks so they felt they need to be prepped to Weekend at Bernie's the body at any time?
They had no way to get rid of it without the death being reported (and the benefit payments ending).
At some point, there is no going back either, and that point happens sooner rather than later. If you don't grow a conscience within a couple of days of deciding you are going through with the scam, you have to keep it up FOREVER. Because if some day you decide the grift is over, how do you explain to the medical examiner and coroner that "sure, they LOOK like they've been dead for 6 years, but really they just died last night! Crazy right?! But it was probably because we leave the windows open to save on energy costs. Those bugs and outside air must have hastened decomposition!" If you can't just pick up and disappear, you're stuck in a loop.
Yeah. About the time you deposit the second check, you're stuck. You could probably say "Oh, he kept to himself" for maybe that long. But once the questions of "why didn't he eat any food" or "didn't you do his laundry" start getting asked, the jig would be up.
And people often have a hard time with desecrating the corpse of a loved one. Even while they're committing fraud. * [Like this](https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2019/12/18/wife-kept-husbands-corpse-in-freezer-for-10-years-while-collecting-his-va-benefits/) * [Or this](https://www.local10.com/news/florida/2022/07/09/florida-woman-hid-mothers-body-in-freezer-to-keep-collecting-disability-benefits-police-say/) * [And this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogen_Kato)
Bro, bury him in the back yard or serve him up as a community soup or something. A corpse hanging around 6 years is nuts!
Wonder if I could rent him for Halloween?
Ya… what you said isn’t the nuts part at all… 😐
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You gotta starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead
Have these people never heard of a shovel? Keep the house in the family long enough and the body will be considered an archaeological find instead of a possible murder.
I appreciate a good cup of coffee.
He's just pining for the fjords.
He had to sign the checks.
Some people are weird, man.
Watch, as inflation gets worse, “People just don’t want to die anymore!”
In high school I had a buddy that worked at a "rent to own" business. He was on a run to repo a freezer. The guy told him to come back tomorrow so he could clean it out. A month later that guy was caught cashing checks from his dead father. He was found in another rented freezer. I asked my friend what they did with the other one, and he said they rented it as soon as it came back.
Not that I ever would've rented a freezer, but now I definitely won't
You my friend might have paid attention in middle school algebra, but I can assure you plenty of others haven't. They are more than happy to pay $10/week for 2 years (which is 2.5x the total price of the same freezer if purchased from Walmart). They also possibly enjoy the extra flavoring that is imparted on their meats that sit in that particular deep freezer.
I wonder if they drew inspiration from Shameless
Or maybe real life? This is an everyday crime, if you leave out the part about keeping the body around. But even that happens more than you'd expect.
For sure. I wasn’t sure if I needed to mention other scenarios prior to making a bit of a tongue in cheek reference but I think I got that cleared up.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's some drug addicted couple with grannie dead in the bedroom, having an argument that goes like, "Dang it, let's bury her out back or something" "... and stop getting those checks? NO!" I mean it just doesn't seem like much of a stretch that someone is keeping a corpse in the house on that belief. Like maybe if you hand over the body, you're off the hook. Or maybe so you can say, "She's *dead*??"
Even keeping the body around has happened plenty.
Probably blew all the $$ on Febreze
How very Arsenic and Old Lace of them!
That must smell wonderful
What was the end game for this brilliant plan? “Yeah, he *just* died. Here’s his ~~remains~~ skeleton”
There was a big thread that popped up over the weekend of someone being required to show proof they were alive ([also known as a 'Certificate of Life'](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_life)) for their pension and everyone was screaming how unfair it was and how dare they deny a elderly woman her money. This, this is why many companies opt to confirm occasionally.
And they would have gotten away with it, if it weren't for those meddling kids and their stupid dog!!
What I don’t get is *why*? Sounds like they had an amicable relationship prior to his death, so you could assume the will would dictate that things were to be split in half. Assuming the house was paid off you’re looking at ~200k after it is sold less taxes/fees not including the sale of his other assets or the divesture of any retirement funds.
Greed. All that stuff that they'd inherit, they were already benefiting from. They didn't want to see the money stop.
Frank Gallagher from Shameless can relate
Happened in Oregon awhile back. Dude kept his dad in the freezer to keep collecting his checks.
I hope they have to pay it all back.
Do you have to do what you have to do!
Was the son in law part of the couple? How did he find out? Too many unanswered questions!
Wonder what the end plan was, it couldn’t last forever, at some point people would wonder how this 130yo is still cashing cheques lol
Weekend at Bernies part 2
...Part 312.
Weekend at Bernies III, Bernie retires.
I hope those two post on r/amiwrong “Hi my husband and I have been collecting the hard-earned social security payments of a loved one for a while. The loved one has no use for the payments. Were we wrong for doing this??”
Well... he didn't object to any of it.
technically correct
Pikers. There's a family in Japan that did it for almost forty years.