A 39-year-old American man who tried to pretend to be dead to avoid paying child support has been sentenced to 81 months in prison for computer fraud and identity theft after hacking into the death registration tool.
Jesse Kipf, of Somerset, Kentucky, accessed Hawaii’s death registration system in early 2023 with a doctor’s contact information that he impersonated to create a record of his own death.
Thanks to the digital signature of the doctor living in another state, the defendant appeared as deceased in government databases, the U.S. Justice Department said in a statement Tuesday.
“He intentionally accessed a computer without authorization and then obtained information from a protected computer for his own gain and as part of identity theft,” the U.S. Justice Department said.
“This scheme was a cynical and destructive effort, based in part on the inexcusable goal of evading child support obligations,” said the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Kentucky.
The damage to government and corporate computer systems and unpaid child support amounts to nearly $200,000, a sum the 30-year-old will have to pay once he has served his prison sentence.
