take the case of glenn williamson. a tech entrepreneur in portland, oregon. two years ago he got the worst news possible. >> i was in the philippines speaking at a conferee. when your phone goes off 15 times and it is 3:00 in the morning in the united states, you have a bad feeling. >> glenn's 73-year-old mother, lee, had died. as her fiduciary and as a 25 year veteran of the tech world, it fell to him to manage her online accounts. >> i knew my mom, being a cool grandma, was on twitter. i knew she had a yahoo account so we had a baseline to start. but that is all we knew. >> >> reporter: after 20 hours of searching glenn found 13 accounts belonging to his mother, including e-mail, social media and shopping accounts. >> so we broke it down into categories. travel, sentimental, security, and basically we searched on about 75 different sites. >> reporter: some had real value. >> after going through all the airlines, nited did indeed have my mom as a customer, and there was 54,000 miles that we were able to retrieve for our family. >> reporter: all this, while h