Immortality, Martha Kunkle, is thine. It was subsequently discovered that Martha Marie Kunkle, a resident of Arlington, Texas, who was born, according to public records, in 1922, had died back in 1995.  fi-cri fallout The Immortal Life of Martha Kunkle 
 
 Martha Kunkle's name appears on thousands of affidavits sent out by Providian National, a credit-card company once owned by Washington Mutual, now owned by JP Morgan, to delinquent customers. Most of the debt was racked up before 2004. Her life, it appears, was undistinguished, or at least unblemished, until her daughter, Lorraine Kunkle, a onetime employee of Washington Mutual, made the unorthodox decision to authorize colleagues at the bank to use her mother's name for the dread process of "robo-signing." Concerns about Ms. Kunkle's affidavits were raised in 2008 by lawyers for Jeanie Cole, one of thousands of Montana residents sued by Portfolio Recovery Associates to collect debts. The lawsuit against the Seattle woman included an October 2006 affidavit in which "Martha Kunkle, Designated Agent" for Providian, swore "to the best of my knowledge" that the amount owed "reflects a true and correct accounting of the cardholder's credit card account."
– Martha Kunkle signed thousands of affidavits for a large debt collector … after her death in 1995. Portfolio Recovery Associates says her signature hasn’t been used since 2008, when its invalidity was first questioned—well, uh, except in one case last July that a rep claims was “inadvertent”—but Kunkle’s name now symbolizes the rash of robo-signing and sloppy documentation that plagues the debt collection business, reports the Wall Street Journal. Robo-signing, according to some judges, is even more common in the debt collection industry than it is in foreclosures. "I've watched and wanted to tell defendants in these suits to demand proof of the underlying debt because that proof is so often flimsy," says one. At least one state attorney general is investigating a number of debt collectors for falsifying affidavits, and notes that the amount of corner-cutting is “alarming.” Click for more, including just how Kunkle’s signature got on all those documents.