profiles of the deceased

No, but I still like to be touched.

            Oct 9 is when he died; Oct 21 is when his heirs cleaned his account.

Implausible, because such things require password.

     What do you know about the guy??  My family has all my passwords in case somthing should happen. There are professional people who know how to deal with death. Maybe chess.com received a letter with a copy of the death certificate as a courtesy.

I don't know. I just assume that Henk's and Peter's disappearances were intentional and their deaths were fake, because the dates of their last login do not fit with dates of alleged deaths. I consider this more plausible than somebody else cracking their passwords posthumously. It is my honest opinion and I wholeheartedly dislike people who touch others in such way. I have seen that before.

http://wattsfuneralhomes.com/peter-m-lamoreaux/

I dont believe this is a fake death

In such case however, chesskia was probably an impostor.

Now he is ! Damn it ! Told you to be careful with that knife !

You may choose between these:

(probability decreasing)

a) These deaths were touching cover-ups for disappearance (my opinion)

b) They were impostors (maybe, but why would anyone do it?)

c) They shared accesses to their accounts with others: friends or family members (it is against ToS, you know?)

d) Some site staff administrator logged in for some weird unknown reason (why?)

e) Chess.com is haunted from the beyond. (MWHUA_HA_HA_HA_!!!)

I understand that one's death shouldn't be played down, but from my own experience online death is only seldom real. The number of various posers and windbags online is way bigger than number of people in real trouble online and when I see such dicrepancies in dates, I just see.

Polar_Bear, it's very common for relatives of the deceased to manage their accounts after they die. No password cracking is needed. They contact the administrators of the site with valid proof of identity and death and they are granted access to the deceased's account. Also, the deceased might not have logged out last time he used his account, so the login at the date you see may very well be cookie-based.

What does that mean?

Are you suggesting he took the Peter Lamoreaux persnona to use on the net? And then, when he needed to 'disappear', he contrived to kill of the real guy? (Who happened to have a real death, remember)

I'm pretty convinced Chesskia was who he said he was. I exchanged emails with him, and he sent me a bunch of training material.

I'm also convinced he was seriously ill, I stopped communicating with him when he became very forgetful and almsot incoherrent.

If ou are proposing what I think, that would be just too bizarre. Some people are actually who the say the are.

Seriously ?

I hope administrators wouldn't do that for online banking accounts (for obvious inheritance abuse reasons). Or poker websites. Or anything with money on the line, without a court order. I also hope they wouldn't do it anywhere where there might be some personal information, which means any site with mail services.

That does not leave many sites without a reason not to give out passwords of dead people.

Even asking for some dead people's account deletion on facebook (let alone really accessing it) is hard and facebook does not have to comply with the request. (link in French)

For these reasons, I would like some sources about your claim.

      I have to chime in here; To Irontiger; Your on the right path, but you sound suspicious. MOST administrators, 99.9%, will not do anything to compromise security, but procedures have to be followed because like the person who started this thread said, "people die everyday". Also, no-one is exempt from a court order, and then there's the aspect of libility, should these procedures NOT be followed. They have more to lose if they don't settle a person's demise properly.

     Now you got my curiosity going. To Irontiger; How come Facebook doesn't have to reply to the request??  I'm not concerned about sites giving out passwords; I'm concerned about the Registry Of Motor Vehicles giving out Social Security numbers of dead people. There are professional scammers who purruse the obituaries every day. They have too much time on their hands. They should be playing chess!

Google it. Google "what happens to my account if I die" for example, with alternate keywords such as "hotmail, twitter, facebook, gmail, etc...". I don't really feel that the burden of proof lies on me. I merely stated what I know for fact. Specifics might differ from site to site, and from case to case, and in some (maybe even most) cases, people will need to have pre-approved on such measures (sometimes as simple as clicking a check box on your profile settings). Everyone that I know of that died had a sibling or a relative access their facebook page for example.

But also, as I said before, sometimes people die while still logged in to their accounts (it depends on cookies/time-out settings and the device one was using such as PC, Mac, mobile, etc..), so relatives gain access that way too.

      To all these people worried about passwords; Where have you been for the past 2 weeks??   Google, Facebook, Snapchat, and TARGET have all been hacked. This is a chess site. There's nothing top secret here.

They basically own the content you posted, from the terms of use. Which means they can do whatever they want with it (unless court orders yada yada).

First hit on google-search : http://lifehacker.com/5890672/what-happens-to-my-gmail-account-when-i-die

Please read it carefully, then reconsider what you know for fact.

The cookie login part of course is totally possible, though it is seriously unsafe to put cookies remembering your passwords on a computer someone else could access. I suppose home computer would be fine, but no laptop should have that. (Remember that guy sitting next you at coffee room ? He just sent a mail coming from your account)

     Thank you Irontiger; I read it wrong. I thought he was implying that Facebook was somehow exempt from court orders. No one is exempt from court orders, including the court. This post is getting away from its original content. In legitimate situations, when someone HAS passed away, its just common sence to close everything related to his life. Now this post is going to scams, and fake deaths, and passwords. Besides computer algarhythms can produce passwords, and rumur has it that Facebook and Microsoft doesn't have that strong of a firewall.

Do you log out every time you walk away from the computer? I know I don't. I have four devices logged in to Chess.com right now (desktop, laptop, tablet, phone).

If I fall off my desk chair now and break my neck, my wife will come downstairs later and be able to hit "enter" for me so you can see this post. If I died while not using a device, she'd have to go to the extreme length of switching something on before she could get into my accounts that would all be still logged in. It's not exactly internet banking here with lots of security and an auto logout after five minutes of inactivity.

I don't know anything about the person in question, and am not arguing for or against your conclusion; I'm just arguing that it's not remotely implausible that relatives access an account post-mortem.

But... How long do lifetime memberships last?

(Of course, more seriously, I'm sure Chess.com simply left the thing in place because there's no pressing reason not to)