Details will vary according to the law of the jurisdiction in which all this happens, obviously. But in general those administering the estate of a deceased person have a positive duty to make reasonable efforts to identify those entitled; they don’t just sit back and wait for claims. Whether it’s reasonable to have remained unaware of a particular creditor’s claim depends on the nature of the claim and the events that actually happened.
If we’re talking about a credit card debt, you’d ordinarily expect people to idenfity the deceased’s financial accounts, if only because they will be looking for accounts with credit balances, plus a bill will usually have been landing in the mailbox every month. So they’ll usually know about credit card debt.
Might be different if the deceased had a secret credit card so that his wife wouldn’t know about his online gambling/porn subscriptions/mistress he was keeping in a city centre apartment, and he had taken steps to avoid having bills sent to his home and had generally concealed matters. People tryign to sort out his affairs might genuinely be unaware of that card, and have no reason to suspect its existence. So it’s all very fact-dependent.
From the point of view of the creditors, people may have been genuinely unaware of the debt despite doing reasonable things to identify all creditors, but the creditor may not know this; the bank that issued the secret card may have no idea that the cardholder was actively concealing it’s existence from his family. So it’s not unreasonable or unrealistic for them to pursue a debt that is due and may be collectible.
As an aside, I assume that’s a drawback of the current bank and credit card companies’ urge to go totally paperless - that relatives will not know the deceased’s credit cards or other financial details unless he has papers or his wallet lying around, or shared his email password. What credit arrangement - if any - the person had for their vehicle or other assets could also be a mystery unless their bank knows.
There must be some sort of “statute of limitations”, that unless they can prove fraud, creditors cannot appear out of nowhere and come after the beneficiaries of an estate after the estate has been distributed. how much effort is an executor supposed to make?
In many jurisdictions, the executor is required to publish a notice in the newspaper giving the decedent’s name, the executor’s contact information, the case number/court, and a deadline date for filing a claim with the court. This is a holdover from the days when most people had purely local business dealings, so of course their creditors would see the notice. Now, there are websites that aggregate notices from newspapers across the state (see, e.g., Kansas Public Notices), and probably nationwide aggregators as well.
The executor is supposed to make “reasonable” efforts. What’s reasonable is going to depend on the circumstances. If you have literally zero information about the deceased financial affairs, you know there is relevant information out there, and you have a duty to go digging for it. You’re mainly doing this for the benefit of the beneficiaries, to make sure that you collect and distribute to them the assets to which they are entitled, but you have a similar duty to the creditors and, in any event, when it comes to looking into the deceased’s financial affairs, the same inquiries are likely to disclose both the assets and the liabilities.
There will be a statute of limitations on this - exactly how long will depend on the juriscition - and there may also be a limitation period, although a considerably longer one, for fraud claims. But if somebody is outside the “regular” limitation period and wants to bring a fraud claim, the onus is very much on them to show that there was fraud, which is a serious allegation and requires serious evidence.
Basically where you have a problem is where the executor is aware of assets and liabities, and he distributes the assets to beneficiaries while ignoring the liabilities. He should be using the assets to settle the liabilities and distributing the residue to the beneficiaries. But if you do what DrDeath did [great username/post combo there] and notify creditors of the death and they drop the claim, that’s fine.