US man who faked death to avoid $100,000 in child support gets six years in prison

A southern Kentucky man who admitted to faking his death while attempting to avoid paying more than $100,000 in child support that he owed to his ex-wife has been ordered to spend more than six years in federal prison.

Jesse Kipf’s punishment for pleading guilty to charges of computer fraud and identity theft essentially closes the book on one of the stranger hacking cases seen in the US criminal justice system.

According to court papers that he endorsed with his signature, the 39-year-old Kipf accessed the Hawaii state government’s computer registry of dead people in early 2023, impersonated a medical certifier and falsely certified that he had died as he sought to skimp on child support obligations to his former wife.

“This resulted in Kipf being registered as a deceased person in many government databases,” prosecutors in the US attorney’s office near the defendant’s home town of Somerset, Kentucky, said in a statement .

The alive-and-well Kipf then digitally infiltrated other states’ death registry systems – as well as hotel chains’ booking platforms – using credentials stolen from various medical workers and physicians. He sold access to those systems along with databases of private information, including social security numbers, to fellow cybercriminals on what is colloquially known as the dark web.

Kipf’s buyers came from countries such as Algeria, Russia and Ukraine, court filings asserted. His scheme eventually went awry, and after being criminally charged, he finalized a plea deal with federal prosecutors in April that left him facing up to seven years in prison.

US district judge Robert Wier recently gave Kipf six years and eight months. Federal law requires him to serve 85% of his sentence, and he must be supervised by the US probation office for three years after his release.

Prosecutors said Kipf owed a total of about $196,000 in connection with his remaining child support debt as well as for the damages he inflicted to governmental and corporate computer systems.

“This scheme was a cynical and destructive effort, based in part on the inexcusable goal of avoiding his child support obligations,” the US attorney for the eastern district of Kentucky said in a statement. “This case is a stark reminder of how damaging criminals with computers can be … and will serve as a warning to other cybercriminals.”