FAIRBANKS, Alaska (KTUU/KTVF) – Ellis Kingsep, a 77-year-old Canadian National, was sentenced on Monday to 30 months in prison for committing fraud.
The sentencing at the federal courthouse in Fairbanks followed a guilty plea signed by Kingsep. He has been charged with stealing over $420,000 in Social Security benefits for three decades.
According to the Dept. of Justice, “from roughly 1995 to 2023, Kingsep devised and executed an elaborate scheme to defraud the Social Security Administration (SSA) by causing the agency to send benefits payments intended for Kingsep’s mother to accounts Kingsep controlled. Kingsep’s mother would now be 103 years old and is presumed deceased.”
According to the court documents, Kingsep created “an intricate web of mail forwarding requests for his mother’s mail by using private postal mailbox accounts in California, Vancouver, British Columbia, and Alaska to conceal that he was receiving his mother’s mail and sending correspondence in her name.”
In 2013, the private …