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A serial fraudster in Nova Scotia has been sentenced to four and a half years in prison after pleading guilty to a long list of charges.
Supreme Court Justice James Chipman sentenced Alissa MacGillivary, also known as Katherine MacDougall, on Thursday to 54 months behind bars.
The list of offences she was found guilty of includes submitting false claims of dead family members in order to receive paid leave from several jobs, as well as receiving income assistance payments under false pretenses.
She pleaded guilty in December 2025 to 19 counts stemming from nearly 50 charges involving fraud, forgery and impersonation.
Crown attorney William Mathers says it’s hard to find a fraud case as extreme as this one.
“I’ve personally never seen anything like it,” he said.
Justice Chipman said MacGillivary admitted she provided unreliable information to the court during the sentencing phase. She claimed she was Indigenous at one point during the trial and then later withdrew that assertion.
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“There were certain things the Crown said directly you’re lying about, for instance, the degrees from Dalhousie (University), the existence of other children, even through the sentencing phase,” said Mathers.
According to an agreed statement of facts, MacGillivary was hired at several businesses using a range of fake names. She obtained paid bereavement leave from Southland Transportation by falsely claiming she had a three-year-old daughter who was killed by a drunk driver in Newfoundland.
She was then employed at Kent Building Supplies, under a different alias, where co-workers and the company raised $3,000 for her after she made similar false claims.
“She went after a man for child support for a child that didn’t exist. She manufactured the creation of the child, manufactured a medical condition that would explain the unexpected pregnancy,” said Mathers.
Before her arrest in 2024, she used similar tactics to obtain paid leave from jobs at Bishop’s Cellar and Krown Rust.
Court documents also show she defrauded what was then known as the Department of Community Services of nearly $20,000 between 2017 and 2024.
MacGillivary has apologized for her actions but Justice Chipman said the moral culpability of her actions falls “at the highest end of the spectrum.”
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