New Jersey funeral directors are being alerted to a new scam that could expose their computer systems to malicious software.

The Division of Consumer Affairs has warned all licensed professionals that the email scam instructs licensees to download a “new license software.”

“Clicking on the link in the email and following the instructions may result in the automatic download of malicious software onto your device,” an email from the division says.

The division does not require any software downloads for renewals or applications processes and would not ask system users to download software.

“Please never click on any suspicious links,” the division email states. “Immediately report any email or text you receive containing this or a similar message.”

Those who receive the email should contact the division at askconsumeraffairs@dca.njoag.gov or by calling 973.504.6200. Licensees may also contact the Division of Criminal Justice at dcjtipline@njdcj.org or by calling 800.277.2427. The email can also be reported to the Federal Trade Commission at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.

Security experts advise consumers to never open suspicious emails and to delete them immediately. If you do open a suspicious email, do not click on any links provided. Clicking on suspicious links opens your device to malware, ransomware and the potential for identity theft.

Oklahoma’s funeral directors may be left without government supervision following Governor Kevin Stitt’s veto of legislation that would have prolonged the life of the Oklahoma Funeral Board.

Many of the state’s professional boards are subject to a sunset clause, which necessitates them being reauthorized periodically. Stitt’s veto killed a bill to keep the board operating until July 1, 2026. Both board members and Oklahoma funeral directors are concerned about the veto’s repercussions.

“I don't know of any contingency plan of any of these rules going to another agency at this time. I haven't seen that,” board President Tyler Stiles told NPR. “So my understanding is anyone could embalm a body or cremate a body without any training or education.”

Stitt’s veto message blamed the funeral board for stifling competition in Oklahoma, unnecessarily inflating costs and preserving the status quo.

“For too long, the Funeral Board has shielded the funeral industry from meaningful competition in the sale of caskets, urns, and other funeral related merchandise and services,” Stitt wrote. “These barriers keep prices artificially high for grieving families. Instead of modernizing, the Board has preserved outdated regulations and entangled businesses in unnecessary red tape.”

The legislature needed to reevaluate how the board is structured and establish better oversight of its actions, Stitt wrote.

The board is tasked with the regulation, education and oversight of Oklahoma’s funeral directors, as well as handling consumer complaints. Its dissolution inevitably will hinder the consumers it is supposed to help, Stiles said.

The Oklahoma Funeral Directors Association agreed.

“The Oklahoma Funeral Board exists for one clear purpose: to protect the public by ensuring that funeral service professionals meet the highest ethical and professional standards,” association President Brandon Lee told NPR. “This work is not simply bureaucratic. It involves deeply personal and sensitive moments in people’s lives–moments that deserve integrity, compassion, and oversight tailored to the unique nature of our profession.”

An old case involving a rogue funeral director convicted of mishandling human remains and accused of conspiracy to commit murder is back in the news, thanks to a soon-to-be-released documentary on HBO.

The three-part documentary, scheduled to debut on June 1, 2025, chronicles the story of David Sconce, a California funeral director who operated the Lamb Funeral Home, and turned the venerable family-owned business into an exploitative cash machine, breaking numerous California laws in the process. Sconce is the great-grandson of the funeral home’s founder, Charles F. Lamb.

HBO calls The Mortician a “darkly gripping series” that explores how what was once considered “gold standard in the funeral industry” became notorious for “morally questionable and inhumane practices.” Sconce pleaded guilty to 21 counts of mishandling human remains and hiring thugs to rough up his rivals in 1989. He was sentenced to five years in prison. The former funeral director, however, went back to prison in 2013 for violating the terms of his parole. He was released from custody again in 2023.

Sconce was accused of conducting mass cremations of human remains in a bid to cut his costs and maximize his profits. A family member of one decedent told HBO that Sconce “violated and desecrated my father. It’s unconscionable.”

Sconce, who was interviewed by HBO, expressed no remorse for his actions. In a trailer released by the cable company, Sconce defended his treatment of the human remains entrusted to his care.

“I don’t put any value on anybody after they’re gone and dead. As they shouldn’t when I’m gone and dead. Love ‘em when they’re here,” Sconce told HBO.

HBO said that more than 20,000 families were affected by Sconce’s actions.

A potter’s field in New York City may be getting a series of improvements in a plan currently under review. A California funeral home is being sued for allegedly placing the wrong body in a casket during visitation. And pet owners who were allegedly victimized by a funeral director who also ran a pet cremation business gather to memorialize their lost animals. These stories and more are in the week in funeral news.

NEWS

Hart Island, New York City’s Potter’s Field, Can Get Major Upgrades under New Plan
By Nicole Rosenthal (New York Post)
The city’s long neglected potter’s field may get an upgrade that includes a new visitor’s center, restrooms and benches. Hart Island’s facelift would come over 20 years and would include more shade coverage on the 131-acre site to accommodate a growing number of families visiting the isolated site, according to a concept plan that will be officially unveiled next month. Read more here.

Pet Owners Who Used Services of Funeral Director Accused of Mishandling Remains Gather for Support
By Brian C. Rittmeyer (TribLive)
Rick and Terri Wagner traveled from their New Kensington, PA, home to Derry Township in search of closure. Their beloved spanador, Bailey, a mix of a cocker spaniel and a Labrador, was one of the thousands of pets authorities say Patrick Vereb mishandled through his cremation business, Eternity Pet Memorial. Read more here.

My Father’s Friend Who Knew Nothing about His Alcoholism Surprised Us at His Funeral
By Oona Frawley (The Irish Times)
At my father’s funeral, I sat with my arm around my mother and the feeling of holding her near is almost all that remains of the service in my mind. Now I wish I had spoken, even though I had little to say. I had never before been to a funeral and didn’t know what happened at them, except vaguely–there was a Mass, I understood, but what prayers or rituals were added in I didn’t know. I was unaware that family members often spoke. I had no knowledge of burials except for cinematic ones, where people circled a hole in the ground dressed in black, weeping. This seemed unlikely to happen given that my father would be cremated, and also because I had never noticed anything but small historical graveyards in Manhattan. Read more here.

California Family Sues Funeral Home for Allegedly Placing Wrong Body in Casket
By BET
A California woman says her family’s moment of mourning turned into a surreal nightmare when she walked into a viewing and found a complete stranger lying in the casket–and suit–meant for her uncle. Read more here.

Lagos, Nigeria, Cemetery Where Bodies Are Buried in One-Foot Graves
By Chijioke Iremeka (Punch)
Hammed Adeyemo stood quietly at the edge of the waterlogged grave, her eyes brimming with tears as she watched the body of her aunt, Mutiat, being lowered into a muddy trench barely a foot deep at the Iyana-Isasi Cemetery in Lagos, Nigeria. At the cemetery located off the Lagos-Badagry Expressway, near the Iyana-Isasi bus stop, the 31-year-old fashion designer grieved not just the loss of her beloved aunt, but also the indignity of her burial. Read more here.

TRENDS

No Cement Vault, No Metal Casket and No Embalming: Lee, MA, Carves out Space for Green Burials
By Lauren Dorsey (The Berkshire Eagle)
Joan Angelo, a retired hospice nurse, has seen a lot of funerals. Her experiences have helped her make a decision about her own: “After trying to lead a pretty green life and eating organically, I don’t want to be stuffed with formaldehyde at the end,” Angelo said. When the time comes, Angelo hopes to have a green burial–a simple, natural approach with no embalming, metal caskets or concrete vaults. Instead, the body is laid to rest in a shroud, pine box, or reinforced cardboard. Angelo felt so strongly about her last wishes that she approached the Lee, MA, Department of Public Works several months ago, hoping to make the increasingly popular option of a green burial open to Lee residents. Read more here.

Makeshift baseball diamonds, shotgun shells and bouncy houses might not seem like they should be part of funeral services, but for one Iowa funeral director, they are all a part of modern life celebrations and a way to stay relevant in a changing industry.

Lanae Strovers, a funeral director at Hamilton’s Funeral Home in Des Moines, recently shared some of her more unique funerals with The New York Times as part of the news organization’s “Making It Work” series on small businesses seeking solutions to evolving markets.

“I don’t want to say that we’re going to become party planners,” Strovers told the Times.

“But I think that those two lines are crossing over and we just need to open up our thought process and be there to help the families.”

That refrain is being repeated over and over again: Meet the families of decedents where they are. Don’t confine them cookie-cutter services–visitation, religious service, burial, with mourners all dressed in black. What they want may be exactly what they need, a celebration of the life lived rather than a mourning of the life lost. And, if the families desire, help them with that grief as well.

A recent survey conducted by the Northeast Funeral Service Partnership shows that about 87 percent funeral home owners and managers polled believe that changing customs and non-traditional funerals are important to their businesses. Coupled with the rise in cremations, these changing traditions have taken a chunk out of funeral home profits, leaving funeral directors to ponder alternative ways to memorialize the dead and serve families.

Strovers and her funeral home seem on the road to figuring it out.

One decedent’s cremated remains were loaded into shotgun shells, and Strovers organized a memorial hunt for him, the Times reported. A former Little League coach was treated to a sendoff that included a makeshift baseball diamond, popcorn and hot dogs. A young child was memorialized with a circus theme, including an inflatable bouncy house.

New Jersey funeral homes are no stranger to innovative funeral services. In 2023, for example, Whigham Funeral Home, a New Jersey State Funeral Directors Association firm, organized a celebration of life event for a fashion designer at the Newark Museum of Art. Video of the event, which featured a friend of the designer strutting down a runway to the man’s casket, went viral, gaining more than 36 million views on X, the social media platform known as Twitter.

Not every creative funeral goes viral, though. Some are quieter affairs, but no less meaningful. Funeral directors have arranged for service animals to provide comfort and distraction. Memorial services, often held after dispositions, are becoming more common. Funeral home websites are now offering tips to consumers seeking to memorialize a decedent, and some seek to explain the difference between traditional funeral services and celebrations of life.

Walker Posey of Posey Funeral Directors in North Augusta, SC, has been spending time informing families that life celebrations can be arranged even when a decedent is cremated, the Times said. Posey said it is time for funeral directors to start acknowledging their changing role.

“We’re no longer just a funeral company who does events,” Posey told the Times. “We’re an event company who does funerals.” 

There was no bigger funeral event recently than the ceremonies surrounding the death of Pope Francis. To watch the spectacle unfold was to appreciate the art of planning. Cardinals dressed in red, dignitaries dressed in black or dark-colored clothing, and seas of white, symbolizing purity, were all on display in massive blocks, all against the splendor of the Vatican, the seat of the Roman Catholic church for 2,000 years. It all seemed very traditional … until it wasn’t.

Francis sought to be buried in a church in Rome, not in the Vatican where other pontiffs are laid to rest. At the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore where Francis was buried, the pope’s remains were greeted not by the princes of the church but by “a group of the poor and needy” paying “their last respects to Pope Francis before the burial of his coffin,” according to a statement from the Vatican press office.

It was a personalized touch for a Jesuit priest from Argentina who spent his formative years ministering to those in need and who never forgot their plight. The moment showed that even an institution with two millennia of tradition can allow for a remembrance that reflects the individual.

If the church can do it, so can the rest of us.

Celebrant Training

The New Jersey Funeral Service Education Corporation is once again holding a three-day Certified Celebrant Training course at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Atlantic City from September 16 to September 18, 2025.

The program will teach participants how to prepare unique and personalized life tributes by learning the value of funerals, honing listening skills, conducting family interviews with empathy and more.

Registration for the program will be limited to 30 seats. Those wishing to register can do so here.

In observance of Memorial Day, the office of the New Jersey State Funeral Directors Association will be closed on Monday, May 26, 2025.

We are thankful for those military personnel who made the ultimate sacrifice in service to their country. On this holiday, we honor them.

The office will reopen at 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday, May 27, 2025.