Most fake-death funeral claims pass every check an insurer runs.
By Mouna Eksteen, CEO, XTND
Most of the fake-death funeral claims we investigate looked in order when they reached the claims desk. The policy was past its waiting period, the death was registered with Home Affairs and the supporting documents were complete. Each check the insurer ran came back clean.
The policy
The fraud begins when the policy is taken out. The person insured may not exist, or may already have died. The details the insurer receives are false from the first day, and nothing about the application looks unusual. Funeral policies are easy to buy, through banks, retailers and call centres.
The same person is often insured more than once. One "deceased" can sit behind several policies at different insurers, with a different claimant named on each.
The waiting period
For months, nothing happens. The waiting period runs its course.
The death
Once the waiting period ends, a fraudulent death is registered with Home Affairs. From that point, an insurer that checks the death against Home Affairs will find it confirmed.
The claim
The claim arrives with false supporting documents. The claims team now has two jobs. The first is getting enough supporting documents from the claimant to assess the claim. The second is checking them: confirming the death, verifying the claimant's relationship to the insured person, looking for inconsistencies and deciding whether the claim carries fraud risk. Much of that checking is manual and depends on outside sources.
The payout
If the claim passes the insurer's checks, it pays. The other policies on the same "deceased" may be paying out at other insurers at the same time, each one passing its own checks.
No single step gives the fraud away.
No single step in that story gives the fraud away. It shows when the steps are seen together:
- A claim soon after the waiting period ends
- The same person named on policies and claims at other insurers
- A claim value that doesn't fit the policy
- A doctor or funeral undertaker linked to past fraud
Veritas scores each funeral claim against those signals as it arrives, using patterns from claims across every insurer in our network. The assessor sees a green or red result and the checks behind it. Honest claims can be paid quickly, and the rest go to an investigator with the reasons already set out.
In Financial Year 2026, Veritas received more than 300,000 claims. We carried out more than 13,500 investigations across the country and repudiated R244.6 million in fraudulent claims.
Funeral claims rise from late August to mid-January, and fraud rises with them. If you would like to see what the scorecard shows on your own funeral claims, send us ten from this peak.
Send us ten claimsMouna Eksteen is CEO of XTND.
