Obtaining a fake death certificate is easier than you think

Published 13 Nov 2024 • Updated 16 Dec 2025

Table of contents

1. What is a death certificate?
2. How are death certificates legally obtained?
3. Potential reasons for faking a death certificate
4. Where are death certificate templates available?
5. How a fake death certificate template looks like
6. The issue of cross-border death verification
7. How we came across a fake death certificate
8. How to check for any document type, from anywhere

What is a death certificate?

A death certificate, also known as proof of death, is an official legal document issued by the government that certifies the date, place, and cause of a person’s death. It is essential for various legal and administrative processes, such as settling the deceased’s estate, claiming life insurance, closing bank accounts, and notifying government agencies like the Social Security Administration.

The document typically includes personal details of the deceased and is usually issued by the state’s vital records office after being prepared by a medical professional, such as a physician or coroner.

How are death certificates legally obtained?

The process of obtaining a death certificate generally begins with the funeral home, which often handles the initial paperwork. Relatives or legal representatives can request certified copies from the local vital records office or through the country’s official channels.

The process can take anywhere from 2 to 4 weeks, depending on the state and whether there are any complications, such as an ongoing investigation into the cause of death.

The cost varies by state but typically ranges from $5 to $30 per copy​.

Some institutions even make the process fully digitalized, one example being the City of Boston, which even provides a full-text search of all archived deceased persons you can order a certificate for.

And mind, this description only relates to how this works in the United States. Things will undoubtedly vary significantly across the world – longer processing times, higher costs, or more difficulty communicating with authorities are likely in more isolated or less developed countries.

Potential reasons for faking a death certificate

You may have seen fictional characters trying to fake their deaths in movies or books, most often with the purpose of escaping their situation or bluffing their enemies. This strategy is as old as drama itself — whether it’s Shakespeare’s Juliet, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Marvel’s Loki, or Quentin Tarantino’s The Bride, all of these characters have faked their deaths to achieve their goals.

But why would you fake your death in the real world? Unsurprisingly, it comes down to money:

• Insurance Fraud: A person might fake their own death to claim life insurance benefits, or to allow a beneficiary to claim the insurance payout.
• Debt Evasion: Individuals might fake death to escape significant financial obligations, such as debts or taxes.
• Legal Evasion: Criminals might use a fake death certificate to evade law enforcement or avoid pending legal actions.
• Immigration and Identity Fraud: Someone might fake a death to create a new identity, either to stay hidden or to start afresh in another location.
• Inheritance Manipulation: In some cases, family members might fake a relative’s death to expedite or manipulate the distribution of an inheritance.

These are just some of the reasons people commit death fraud, and it’s more widespread than you might think. Recorded instances of death fraud featured in the media include people trying to avoid jail sentences, paying for child support, collecting life insurance payouts, or gaining a scholarship.

Where are death certificate templates available?

Once again, it all can start with a simple search query. Phrases like fake death certificate or death certificate template will yield tens of thousands of results, with some of these being highly relevant.

Scribd, for example, lists more than 310k results when searching for a death certificate, a staggering number even the template farms pale in comparison with.

The platform’s search bar even gives you a list of the most popular queries to get an idea which countries or formats might be the most coveted ones.

Obviously, the quality and usability of these will vary significantly, but even just the sheer volume of stored files suggests there will be many documents of sufficient quality that even template farmers might get their inspiration from.

Our research into template farms shows death certificate templates available for virtually any country.

And that’s just for a couple of template farmers whose catalogs we already analyzed, meaning there undoubtedly is way more of these templates available online.

Just as with other document types, template farms operate like regular online shops, displaying a template catalog on a website that you can browse through, put items in a cart, and process the payment.

And the price point? Our data shows the average price for a death certificate is about $ 28.

How a fake death certificate template looks like

Very generally, almost all fake death certificate templates we have seen in template farms’ offerings share several basic components like:

• an artsy, decorative framing,
• a country-specific coat of arms,
• a section containing personal information of the deceased person,
• an official-looking stamp of the issuing institution, and
• a section with date and signature of the issuing authority.

With these components done right, template farmers can quickly emulate the look of official legal documents.

Even if a fake death certificate is constructed professionally, a single typo can give fraudsters away. Luckily, farmers aim to provide editable templates, so fraudsters have more than one way of screwing things up if they were not paying proper attention in grammar class.

The issue of cross-border death verification

Verification processes of such a vital piece of documentation are complex, and smaller financial institutions might have a much tougher time conducting all the necessary steps, especially in cases where fraudsters are not amateurs. The potentially high payouts in cases such as life insurance frauds imply that fraudsters will not embark on this fraudulent journey without some level of preparation.

The question of document unfamiliarity is not to be underestimated when it comes to document fraud.

How we came across a fake death certificate

While such cases are not overly frequent, our team has recently dealt with a fake death certificate being submitted into one of our clients’ document processing pipeline. Protecting our clients’ data and confidentiality means we can’t go into personal info or specifics of this case within the article. Regardless, it provides at least a bit of an insight into how these documents might be altered.

The fake death certificate was submitted as an image and triggered several of our risk indicators, including:

• Image containing tampered regions.
• Image containing digitally modified characters.
• Image containing unusual characters.
• Image being marked as re-saved.

How to check for any document type, from anywhere

Template farms know the diversity of their customers, and often focus on a plethora of document types, fueling the proliferation of all kinds of document fraud.

In a global economy, you need to act with a global perspective yourself. We intentionally develop our solutions in a way that is document and language agnostic, meaning that it doesn’t need to know a document beforehand to check it for fraud, nor does it need to read the content of the documents. It looks at how a document is built, rather than what it says.