How to Find Out Which Online Accounts Someone Had After They Die

Nobody leaves a list. An average adult has well over a hundred online accounts, and the people closest to them usually know about a dozen. The rest are found by accident, months later, when a renewal email arrives or a stranger comments on a profile nobody remembered.

You will not find every account, and you do not need to. The aim is to find the ones that cost money, hold memories, or carry a risk if they are left open. This guide gives you ten places to look, in the order that finds the most for the least effort, and then explains what you can and cannot do with a password once you find one.

Start With What Matters

Sort everything you find into three groups. Money: bank and savings accounts, PayPal, subscriptions, shopping accounts with balances, investments and cryptocurrency. Memories: photos and messages in Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and WhatsApp. Risk: the email account, social media profiles that could be hacked or impersonated, and marketplace accounts that could be used to sell things in the person's name. Money and risk are urgent. Memories are important but can wait a few weeks, as long as nobody cancels the phone or the cloud storage in the meantime.

1. The Phone

The phone is the master key. Every app on the home screen is an account, and the full list is longer than the home screen shows: on an iPhone look in the App Library and in Settings under General, then iPhone Storage; on Android look in Settings under Apps. The notifications and the text message inbox are useful too, because security codes and delivery updates reveal services the person used without an app.

Keep the phone charged and do not wipe it, even if it is locked. Our Apple and Google guides explain what is and is not possible with a locked phone, and the WhatsApp guide explains why the phone number should stay active for now.

2. The Email Inbox

If you can open the person's email, the inbox is the best record there is. Search for "welcome to", "verify your email", "your account", "receipt", "invoice", "subscription", "renewal", "password" and "order confirmation". Gmail hides much of this in the Promotions and Updates tabs, so check both. Sort by sender and you will see the same companies again and again. Note the service, the email address it uses, and whether money is involved.

Do not close the email account until you have finished with every other account, because the resets and confirmations for all of them arrive there. Our email guide explains the order.

3. Bank and Card Statements

Twelve months of statements catch nearly every paid account, including the yearly ones such as domain names, antivirus and cloud storage. Look for the same name every month and for anything once a year. Merchant names are often shortened: APPLE.COM/BILL, GOOGLE* with a name after it, AMZN, PAYPAL* with a name after it, MICROSOFT*, PLAYSTATION, and the streaming services under their own names. Our subscriptions guide explains what to do with each.

4. Password Managers and Browsers

Many people keep every login in one place without realising it. On an iPhone, the Passwords app (or Settings, then Passwords on older versions) lists every site with a saved login. On Android and in Chrome, Google Password Manager does the same. Edge, Firefox and Safari keep their own lists. Apps such as 1Password, Bitwarden and LastPass hold everything, and some of them have an emergency access or legacy feature that the person may have set up for a relative.

Two other things to check: whether the person set up an Apple Legacy Contact or Google's Inactive Account Manager, both of which give a named person access after a death, and the paper password book. A notebook of passwords in a drawer is extremely common, especially among older people, and it is often the single most useful document in the house.

5. Paper and Post

Letters, renewal notices, bills and statements keep arriving for months, and each one names a company with an account. Collect the post rather than letting it pile up. In the UK, Royal Mail will redirect a deceased person's post to the executor, which is worth setting up early.

6. Devices Around the House

A smart television is signed in to streaming services. A games console holds a store account with a card attached. A smart speaker is tied to an Amazon, Google or Apple account. Tablets, laptops, a car's connected app, a smartwatch and a doorbell camera all carry logins. Switch each one on and note what it is signed in to.

7. Social Media and the Public Web

The person's Facebook profile, Instagram bio, LinkedIn page and YouTube channel often link to each other and to other sites. Search their name, and search any username you know, because people reuse the same username across many services. Old blogs, personal websites and forum profiles surface this way. If they owned a website, a domain lookup shows where it is registered.

8. Two Factor Apps and Security Codes

Authenticator apps list the accounts they protect, which makes them an accidental inventory. They are also the reason for sequencing: many accounts send codes to the phone number or the email address, so closing either one first can lock you out of everything else. Deal with the phone number and the email last.

9. Money You Might Not Expect

Some accounts hold value that is easy to miss. Cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets, investment and trading apps, betting accounts, marketplace balances on eBay, Vinted or Etsy, PayPal, gift card balances, and loyalty points such as airline miles, supermarket points and hotel points, some of which can be transferred to a spouse on request. Tell the executor or the solicitor about all of them, because they are part of the estate. Our PayPal guide shows how one of them is handled.

10. Ask the People Who Knew Them

A partner knows the shopping accounts, a grown up child knows the streaming logins, a colleague knows the work systems, a carer knows the online pharmacy. A short conversation with each of them fills gaps that no search will.

Found a Password. Now What?

Finding a password does not give you the right to use it. Almost every platform's terms say only the account holder may sign in, and in the UK using someone else's login without authority can be an offence under the Computer Misuse Act, even with good intentions. An executor has authority over the estate, but each platform decides who may access an account, and most of them have an official process for a death that does not involve the password at all.

The safer route is to use those processes, which our complete guide walks through platform by platform, with the documents guide covering what each one asks for. Many families do open an unlocked phone to save photos and messages, and that is a decision for the family. Never move money out of the person's accounts yourself. That is the executor's job, and it goes through the bank and the estate.

Make the List

Write down each account as you find it: the platform, the email address or username, what the family wants to happen to it (close, memorialise or keep for now), and who is dealing with it. Our checklist of digital accounts gives you a ready made list to tick through, and the delete or memorialise guide helps with the hardest decision on it.

Or Let Us Handle All of It

Departed Digital manages the whole process for families: finding the accounts, then Facebook, Instagram, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, PayPal and any other platform, in one case. You send the documents once, we run every request and chase every silence until each account is closed or memorialised, and you receive a written record of everything for the family and the estate.

Packages start from £149, checkout shows your local currency automatically, and we work with families in the UK and internationally.