As a newbie pensioner I just did this for the first time for France. On their app you take a normal selfie, and then you have to do a couple of videos following the onscreen instructions, eg close your eyes for so many seconds, turn your head slowly to the left. I guess the videos would be hard to fake.

Which site was that?

I received the life certificate to fill in at my home address in Italy in June this year and sent back by recorded delivery with the Italian post office. In October I noticed my pension had been stopped and at the same time I received another life certificate stating that the first one had not been received. I checked online and saw that it had indeed been received and wrote an accompanying letter with the second certificate which I sent by ups. I happened to be in the uk the following week and called the international pension office to be told that they had received both certificates as indicated by the postal service and approved them but for some reason the payment had been suspended because the process hadn’t been closed correctly. The stress and worry it caused was immense and I cannot help thinking how the system is flawed and easily abused. My local chemist who knows me well was happy to sign the form in English but frankly it’s not very official and as ridiculous as a British bank not accepting my Italian ID card as proof of my address but wanting a utility bill instead.

I knew I'd seen it somewhere ... A couple of days ago I received a letter from AVS (Swiss equivalent of UK DWP):


Brilliant! Why can't the Brits hook the DWP 'puters up to 'other systems' properly?

Are you kidding me? The 2016 foot-gun referendum won't allow that to happen. We'll still be sending original paper utility bills (do they still exist?) and having people in certain professions (you can see from just that list that reports of the UK being a classless society are exaggerated) countersigning passport photos for decades yet...

Ok, maybe it was wishful thinking on my part, moon on a stick kind of thing.

For my last UK proof of life certificate, I had mentioned it to my pharmacist who said that although she'd never witnessed one before, she'd be up for the challenge. As it turned out I had to go to the town hall on another matter, the people on the front desk there are old hands at this, it took them just a couple of minutes.

Now I wonder just what all these P.O.L requests are for, IMO any excuse to stop paying what they are duty bound to pay.

They are doing it because people dont report deaths to the UK authorities so they can carry on claiming benefits or private pension payments confident that they probably won’t be chased for any overpayment.
I should have thought that was blindingly obvious!

Yes it is obvious that they require proof of life it’s just that the method they use is in my opinion unreliable and then my gripe was that they had indeed received the document twice but still stopped my pension for some inexplicable reason

Not so Fred (IMO) as in the UK you have no choice to report a death (period !)
Obvious ?, if so tell us how ?

If you die in Spain you will probably get away with it.

Thought things were roughly the same in Spain but maybe not as you say.

I've heard of a race to take money out of the soon-to-be-deceased's bank account using their bank card so the surviving spouse has money after their bank accounts are frozen (often a problem if the husband took care of everything), but in theory once the death is reported to the undertakers the ball starts rolling... the undertakers will tell Registro Civil, then Registro Civil will tell Seguridad Social. Sometimes things aren't done though, like Tell Us Once in the UK which turns into Tell Us Several Times.

In France the trick is to have a joint account in the name of Monsieur OU (or) Madame. Then, subject to the conditions that were agreed and signed when the account was opened, this account will not be blocked. However a joint account in the name of Monsieur ET (and) Madame will be blocked.
I don't know if this difference exists in Spain?