I wonder what would happen if you just "walked away" on a hiking trip, got declared dead, and your family family got the life insurance, but you just showed back up five years later.

You never claimed to be dead. So it seems that's not illegal. If your family really thought you were dead, they didn't do anything illegal either. Could they be forced to give the money back?

I imagine the legalities of being declared "not dead after all" would be pretty difficult.

Difficult indeed. This happened to a guy in Ohio - he just up and left, and was declared dead in absentia.

He wasn't charged with anything because he never pretended to be dead (and also because he was legally dead and therefore tricky to prosecute). But, he went before a judge and totally failed to get the declaration reversed. Last I heard, he's still just dead for legal purposes.

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2013/10/10/jud...

IIRC insurance companies tend to want to run out the clock on "missing presumed dead" cases, which can be years. They're reluctant to pay out if there is no body.

Faking your death is entirely legal, provided that is not being done with criminal intent.

But having even a $1 life insurance policy, or $1 in debt, or accessing $1 worth of a reputation-based benefit, might be enough to demonstrate that intent. Most people in the US could not fake their own death without criminal or civil consequences.

We no longer have the "move to the New World" or "move out to the frontier" reset buttons that previous generations had (nor even the "get sentenced to transportation" and "claim sanctuary" buttons).

I noticed the "this is legal" claim in the article, but surely taxes become a huge problem? Even if you're not working, you'd end up either failing to file or revealing that you're still alive.

Couldn't you just file taxes anyways? Would you suffer legal repercussions if you tried to file taxes and they were rejected because you were dead? As previous cases indicate, being found to be alive by the government isn't always adequate to cause them to declare you to be alive again, so you could be both dead and a taxpayer.

You don't have to file Federal taxes if you make less than $10,300 per year.

This isn't true, you don't have to file taxes if you make less income than the standard deduction plus one exemption which changes from year to year and also is also dependent on your age and your filing status and the threshold is different for unearned income.

>I imagine the legalities of being declared "not dead after all" would be pretty difficult.

This exact situation happened in Ohio a few years ago. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/12/us/declared-legally-dead-a...

Yes, the moment your family realizes you are not dead, they need to report that to the insurance company / police. Otherwise, they are committing fraud.

So they report, but they have already spent the money. I do not think it will be straightforward take it back

The family members who knew get arrested, the ones who didn't know disown you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Darwin_disappearance_case

Depends on how you do it, but some people just don't give up on someone "walking away". For example, Bill Ewasko - http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/searchi...

I'm tempted to Google about this but I assume I'd end on a government watch list...