Stop contacting customers who have passed away

Australian state and territory births, deaths and marriages registries, accessed through the Australian Death Check: more than 7 million records.

This is the official record: the same registry data a death certificate is issued from. It is not an inferred list assembled from obituaries, returned mail or complaint records.

The distinction is the entire basis for acting on a match automatically. Inferred deceased lists carry a false-positive rate that makes automatic suppression unsafe, which is why files washed against them still generate the letters they were supposed to prevent.

Matches are graded, not returned as a simple yes or no.

Exact matches across multiple fields can be suppressed automatically. Partial matches are returned for review instead, so a living customer who happens to share a name and approximate date of birth with a deceased person is not cut off in error.

Both failure modes carry real cost, and they are not symmetrical. Missing a deceased record produces a letter to a grieving family. Wrongly suppressing a living customer closes the account of someone who is very much still there and will, reasonably, be upset about it. Grading is what lets you set different thresholds for each.

Quarterly is typical for marketing files and monthly for billing, with the difference driven by consequence, not volume.

Around 190,000 Australians die each year, so a file of any size accumulates deceased records continuously. This is not a backlog you clear once. In a customer file of a couple of hundred thousand records, a quarterly wash will typically flag several hundred.

High-consequence checks do not wait for a scheduled run at all. Account opening and estate payouts are checked per record, at the moment the decision is made.

Your file, returned with per-record flags and match grades, plus a summary report.

How suppression is then applied stays your decision: closing accounts, holding mail, routing to an estates team, or some combination depending on the product. The check identifies the records; it does not impose a treatment, because the right treatment differs between a marketing list and a loan book.

The per-record evidence is retained so that any individual suppression can be explained later, which matters if a family member queries how the account was handled.

Yes. The ADC Check endpoint verifies one identity at a time.

This is standard practice before an estate payout, and during onboarding for AUSTRAC reporting entities, where a deceased identity being used to open an account is a specific and well-recognised fraud vector.

For whole-file work, ADC Check Bulk runs the same check across a file, and Insiight can fold deceased suppression into a broader cleanse alongside address correction, duplicate resolution and contact validation in a single pass.

Deceased identities are actively used to open accounts and claim benefits, and they are attractive precisely because the rightful holder cannot notice or report the misuse.

The documents are genuine. The personal details are real and internally consistent. An identity check that verifies a document against the issuing authority will pass, because nothing about the document is false. The only thing wrong with the application is that the person it describes has died.

A deceased screen is the check that closes that door, and it is one of the few fraud controls that produces an unambiguous answer instead of a probability.

Files are processed in Australia under ISO 27001 controls, used only for the matching run they were supplied for, and deleted according to the retention schedule agreed in your contract.

There is also an obligation pointing the other way, which is often the reason the work gets funded. The Privacy Act expects personal information to be accurate and current, and deceased status is the clearest possible case of a record that is neither.

A scheduled wash is a straightforward way to demonstrate that reasonable steps were taken.