Bank Tells Crofton Woman She's Been Declared Dead

CROFTON, MD — Imagine checking your bank balance to see it has plummeted to zero, wiped out, and a call to the bank tells you that your accounts are frozen. Why the nightmare? Because you've been mistakenly declared dead by a typo a Social Security Administration worker somewhere made.

That's the real life shocker that a Crofton woman had to unravel to regain control of her life and finances. Ellen Baron, 75, said she "freaked" when she saw her money had disappeared, and called her bank thinking she would need its help to find scammers. Instead, she learned the federal office had input her Social Security number by mistake, thus labeling her dead and setting a chain of problems into motion.

Baron told the Capital-Gazette it two weeks of in-person trips to her bank and the local Social Security office to prove that she was, in fact, very much alive. Besides temporarily losing her money, Baron also scrambled to keep health care, and had her prescription plan canceled by the snafu.

“I was first very relieved that I wasn’t scammed,” Baron told the Annapolis newspaper. “Then it was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m dead, what do I do now?’ ”

While she was frustrated with SSA's slow response in returning her to the living, Baron said her husband had fun with it. He bought a tombstone-shaped Halloween prop and put it on her pillow.

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The Social Security Administration accidentally declares about 9,000 people living in the United States dead every year. According to Consumerist, the federal agency processes 2.8 million actual deaths per year, so errors will crop up.

Read the full story on the Capital-Gazette website.

Photo by Ashley Ludwig/Patch