I wrote today about the grisliest type of Social Security fraud: When people hide bodies and keep collecting deceased beneficiaries’ checks. The government often doesn’t catch on until much later, when thousands of dollars have been wrongfully paid out.

Readers have been sending in their own examples of this phenomenon today, and it makes for a morbid reading list.

Take, for instance, the Sacramento boarding-house operator who killed several people, buried them in her yard, and made off with $87,000, part of which she spent on a facelift.

And then there’s this guy, indicted Monday for allegedly collecting his dead mother’s Social Security benefits for almost four decades. The Pittsburg Post-Gazette reports that “he used $304,853 of her benefits before they were stopped in April.”

On the flip side, it looks like the Social Security Administration can’t always keep track of who’s still alive, either. My friend Paul Gottlieb, an excellent reporter with the Peninsula Daily News in Washington, reported last year:

An employee of First Federal in Port Angeles told [Betty Longshore, 92] the bank had been required by law to withdraw $16,953 in federal retirement benefits from her account and return it to the federal government, which mistakenly had believed she was dead while she was receiving the benefits. . . .
Her trials and tribulations began after the U.S. Department of the Treasury sent First Federal a notice at the end of February that said Longshore’s “date of death” was July 20, 2011, according to the notice.
Within 24 hours, all her checking account funds and some of her money market funds were gone, with money returned to the government. . . .
Longshore was told the mistake occurred because “someone clicked the wrong button,” she said.
“Nobody reported my death,” Longshore said, adding that she was telling her story so no one else would have to go through the same thing. “Someone just pushed the wrong button, and whoosh, I was dead, and that shouldn’t happen.”

These mistakes are appalling, considering how much taxpayer money the Social Security Administration handles.