Hacker sentenced to seven years for issuing his own death certificate

A 39-year-old hacker in Kentucky, USA, was sentenced to nearly seven years in prison for hacking into government systems and forging his own death certificate.

The hacker, named Jesse Kipf, fantasized that he could use his superb technical skills to get rid of the shackles of law and social responsibility and gain a "new life." However, his hacker "skills" did not bring him freedom, but instead sent him to the iron gates of a federal prison.

Give yourself a death certificate

Surprisingly, the reason why Kipf took the risk was not to escape from his enemies or abscond with a huge sum of money, but to avoid child support.

In the United States, if a woman is unmarried after divorce, her ex-husband will pay a high amount of child support (this is why many American men have a particularly good relationship with their ex-wife's current husband after divorce). In order to avoid the huge child support, Kipf, who is good at stealing and forging identities, came up with a bold idea: forge his own death certificate to evade responsibility.

In January 2023, Kipf used the username and password of an out-of-state doctor to hack into the Hawaii state death registration system and issued a "death certificate" for himself. Even more absurd is that he also appointed himself as the medical certification officer of the case and completed the "death certificate worksheet" using the doctor's electronic signature.

According to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice, Kipf's losses from illegal conduct, including unpaid child support, exceeded $195,000. He was sentenced to 81 months in federal prison, of which at least 85% of the sentence, or 69 months (about five and a half years), must be spent in prison. After that, he will have three years of supervised release.

Kipf admitted in court that his scheme was designed to evade paying child support after investigators seized his devices, including memory cards, external hard drives and a HP laptop, and found evidence that he had researched whether faking his death would cancel his obligations. His search history showed he searched for "death of father in delinquent child support california" and "cancel deceased child support california," according to The Washington Post.

The double life of an “identity thief”

Kipf's hacking "business" is not limited to "handling" his own "funeral affairs". He is also good at hacking into corporate and government networks, stealing identity access rights and selling them on the dark web.

Investigators found evidence of Kipf's money-making methods on his computers, including databases of Social Security numbers and medical records, "which he sold to 'international buyers, including individuals in Algeria, Russia and Ukraine,'" NBC News reported.

Additionally, Kipf "obtained a false Social Security number for himself, which he used to apply for credit cards and debit accounts in order to continue living under his new identity."

The Crime and Punishment of Hackers

FBI agent Michael Stansbury, who led the investigation, said Kipf was a coward who shirked his social responsibility: "The defendant profited from hacking into multiple systems and maliciously stole the identities of others, and now he will pay the price for that."

The virtual world can be manipulated, but the moral red line and legal punishment are unshakable. Perhaps Kipf once imagined that he could be like Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment, and get rid of the shackles of morality and law with a "superman" attitude, or like "The Shawshank Redemption", "escape from prison" and regain a new life. Obviously, a person who lacks basic moral bottom line does not deserve such a perfect ending.