Plans are being designed to stop Day of the Jackal-style fraudsters using the identities of the deceased.

The practice made famous by the 1971 thriller novel by Frederick Forsyth in which an assassin stole an alias from a gravestone takes many forms and costs the UK £1.7bn a year.

Registrars general across Britain, who record deaths, currently offer information on the recently deceased sought by public and private organisations such as police investigating identity fraud and credit check companies via a time-consuming physical administrative process.

But any delay in such organisations obtaining information could be enough to allow someone with a knowledge of a death, such as an unscrupulous relative, to carry out some form of identity fraud using the deceased's information.

For example, an identity could be used to access existing bank, building society or credit accounts or apply for new financial services in the name of the deceased.

It is proposed that a quicker electronic form of providing such information be created.

A spokesman for the Scottish Executive said the technicalities of the process had yet to be established.

He said: "Timely disclosure of death registration information will help the police, other law enforcement bodies and public and private sector organisations to deal with offences and identify cases of attempted fraud by criminals using the personal details of the deceased.

"This will not only help to combat impersonation of the deceased fraud, but will also reduce the impact on relatives of the deceased who have to deal with the consequences of the identity of their loved ones being stolen."

Last year an Edinburgh mother told how she was devastated after a man who became known as the Real Jackal stole her dead son's identity before posing as an aristocrat. He had assumed the identity of her son, Christopher Edward Buckingham, who died aged eight months in August 1963.

The impostor, then in Elmley Prison, Kent, was believed to be a former US citizen who disappeared from his Florida home more than 20 years ago and carried out numerous frauds under his assumed identity.

The Home Office Identity Fraud Steering Committee last year said the cost of ID fraud had increased to £1.7bn a year from £1.3bn in 2002. It was estimated there were 70,000 instances of such fraud in 2004 and that the current rate of growth will see this reach 100,000 by the end of 2007.