X-Message-Number: 2441
From: whscad1!kqb (Kevin Q Brown +1 201 386 7344)
Subject: CRYONICS Risk of Undetected Death

The following message from the USENET comp.risks news group
unintentionally shows a risk for cryonic suspension members.
If the woman in the story below had been a suspension member,
the suspension team would have been notified three years too late!
                              Kevin Q. Brown
                              INTERNET    
                                 or       
PS: Messages 276 and 277 (Feb. 1991) discuss the need for a heart
    monitor connected to an automatic dialer.  What is the status
    of such monitoring devices today?
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RISKS-LIST: RISKS-FORUM Digest  Tuesday 5 October 1993  Volume 15 : Issue 06

         FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS
   ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator

  . . .

> Date: Sun, 19 Sep 93 17:44:18 PDT
> From: "Alan Frisbie" <>
> Subject: Dead for 3 years, but computer kept paying bills

 From the Reuters News Service, printed in The Los Angeles Times
 Sunday, September 19, 1993:

Computers Paid Bills as Woman in Sweden Lay Dead for 3 Years

Stockholm -- The body of an elderly woman who died in 1990 lay undiscovered
in her apartment for more than three years while computers received her
pension and automatically paid her bills, Swedish police said Saturday.
"It's very unusual for someone to be dead so long without anyone else
reacting," a police duty officer in the Stockholm suburb of Farsta told
the national news agency TT.

The woman's last-opened mail was dated May 11, 1990, police said,
indicating she had died at the age of 72.  Her name has not been made
public.  Police were called to break into the apartment by its landlord
after he had made repeated efforts to gain the occupant's permission to
renovate it.

Alan E. Frisbie, Flying Disk Systems, Inc., 4759 Round Top Drive,
Los Angeles, CA 90065  (213) 256-2575 (voice) (213) 258-3585 (FAX)


   [Also noted by Trevor Jenkins  .
   The RISKS archives also show a previous similar case.  PGN]
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