Hacker father who faked his death to avoid child support gets prison sentence – Later On

A Kentucky man has been sentenced to nearly seven years in prison after hacking state records to fake his own death in hopes of avoiding about $116,000 in child support.

In a press release, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said Jesse Kipf, 39, was convicted of charges including computer fraud and aggravated identity theft. In addition to hacking into the death records of the states of Arizona, Hawaii and Vermont, Kipf also “hacked private companies and attempted to sell access to dark web networks” and stole the identities of real people to open two credit accounts.

Kipf has since agreed to pay $195,758.65 in damages, including alimony he owes his ex-wife and nearly $80,000 to repair damage to the state’s death records.

Carlton S. Shier IV, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Kentucky, said Kipf’s “scheme was a cynical and destructive effort based in part on the inexcusable goal of evading his child support obligations.”

It’s unclear how the scheme was discovered, but it was launched in January 2023 when Kipf used “the username and password of a doctor living in another state” to access the Hawaii Death Registry System and create a “case” for his fake death, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

He then “appointed himself as medical certifier for the case and certified his death, using the doctor’s digital signature,” the press release said.

Afterward, Kipf was listed as “a deceased person in numerous government databases,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, but he didn’t stop there. He continued his scheme for months, hacking into registries in Arizona and Vermont, as well as “private corporate, government, and corporate networks,” using “login credentials stolen from real people.”

Kipf’s goal in hacking two companies that provide services to hotels—Guest-Tek Interactive Entertainment Ltd. and Milestone, Inc.—appeared to be to steal more data to sell on the dark web. But even though these companies provide services that include “using the Internet during hotel stays or using hotel websites,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office found “no evidence that Kipf had access to the personally identifiable information of hotel customers.”

Kipf admitted his scheme was to evade child support payments after investigators seized his devices, including memory cards, external hard drives and an HP laptop, and found evidence he had researched whether faking his death would void his obligation. His search history showed . . .