Identity thieves apply for millions of credit cards per year using personal information of the deceased, study shows. ID Analytics: IDs of nearly 2.5 million dead people are used by criminals to fill out credit card applications each year. The majority of those — about 1.6 million — are typos made by identity thieves when entering Social Security Numbers. The other 800,000 are cases where the thieves intentionally tapped the death rolls for data to fill in the credit applications, the study says. The results were based on about one-third of actual credit card application data submitted over three months.”]