When a family contacts us about a loved one's NexudeIT account, the first thing they often ask is some version of: "why does this take so long?" The honest answer is that fake-death account takeovers are real, they target accounts with money or sentimental value, and the slow parts of our process are the single biggest reason we catch them. This page lays out what each safeguard is, why it exists, and why the friction is on the side of the deceased's family, not against them.

Every Legacy Case has a window during which NexudeIT keeps emailing, texting, and push-notifying the deceased's account — 30 days for Memorialise, 30 days for Transfer, 45 days for Delete. During that window, the account is still loginable. That's the kill-switch: a real, living user who logs in once instantly cancels the case and flags the requester. The vast majority of fraud attempts are stopped here, because a fraudster can fake a document but cannot stop the real owner from logging in.

A Memorialise case requires a Tier 1 reviewer and a Tier 2 reviewer to independently sign off. A Transfer of assets requires a third reviewer from our Legal team. The same admin cannot fulfil two tiers on the same case — the system literally greys out the button. Every approval is cryptographically signed so we can prove later who said yes and when. This is the defence against a single bad actor inside our own organisation.

When a death certificate or court letter is uploaded, our reviewers check it against a library of jurisdiction templates — what does a real Texas death certificate look like? What watermark should be on a French acte de notoriété? They check the hash against a database of known-fraudulent documents seen on other cases. They OCR the issuing authority, the date, and the name, and look for inconsistencies. If anything looks off, the case is escalated to Legal review and may be referred to law enforcement.

When escrow funds are transferred to an executor, NexudeIT retains 25% of the value for 180 days as a fraud-reversal reserve. If a Life Proof reversal succeeds inside that window — meaning the original owner turns out to have been alive all along — we can claw the money back without forcing a court fight. The 25% is never our money; it is held in custody and released to the executor in full at the end of 180 days absent any sustained claim.

Every Legacy Case decision is written to an immutable internal audit log, and an anonymised summary is published in our public Legacy Ledger — case ID, type, jurisdiction, decision date, outcome category. No names, no document contents, no financial figures. The Ledger lets families spot patterns ("why are there four memorial cases on my late father's account?") and lets independent journalists audit our work. The design is modeled on the certificate-transparency logs used in TLS.

In one Memorialise request submitted to NexudeIT, the "requester" uploaded a plausible death certificate and a relationship document, claimed to be a sibling, and asked for fast-track memorialisation of an account with a six-figure store. The 30-day window started. On day 19, the supposedly-deceased account holder logged in from their normal device, normal IP, normal time of day — very much alive and confused about the notification emails. Case cancelled in one click. The "requester" was banned, their KYC data forwarded to law enforcement, and a Legacy Ledger entry was published describing the attempt. That single login saved a real person from losing real money, and it's the reason we'll never shorten the notice window, no matter how much families understandably wish we would.

We know waiting weeks during the worst time of your life is hard. The same friction that makes the wait long is what keeps your loved one's store, escrow funds, and memorial profile from being stolen by someone who saw the obituary in a local paper. Thank you for your patience — it's the price of a process you can actually trust.