Editor’s note: Earlier this week, a judge sentenced Alissa MacGillivray to 4.5 years in prison after she pled guilty to 19 fraud-related offences. The story below was originally published February 2025.
Netflix should check out Alissa MacGillivray.
A miniseries based on her life and crimes would be Catch Me If You Can meets Baby Reindeer. A fun watch for everyone – except for the victims who wish they’d never met her.
Alissa, 51, already had a few convictions for identity theft and tax fraud when police showed up and started thwacking her with more fraud-related charges last summer.
There’s now 178 charges in all, including:
-forging sick notes and a death certificate to get paid leave from her job at Kent Building Supplies in Lower Sackville. She also fundraised loadsofdough from colleagues based on the death of a pretend relative. Noted a former colleague on Reddit: “The last day I heard from her she called in sick, saying she had cancer and that her stepfather died.”
-bilking 10 victims out of $100,000 over the past decade. Her alleged schemes included welfare fraud and insurance fraud, aided by a trove of forged documents RCMP seized from her apartment in Dartmouth last year. Police allege she’s used more than 15 aliases in the last 30 years. Signatures allegedly forged include legalists Ashley Richards and Sarah Squires (N.S. Legal Aid), Dartmouth fambly docs Dr. Sahar Aziz and Dr. Waleed Busahmen and psychologist, Dr. Maria Angelopoulos.
And then there’s Ian Lang.
When Alissa befriended Ian in 2020 he was going through a difficult breakup with his girlfriend. Alissa and Ian were colleagues at Southland Transportation in Dartmouth, where he trained school bus drivers and she was a dispatcher.
They were soon a couple.
But only six months into their relationship, things “started getting strange,” Ian tells Frank.
Little things, like the time they went shopping at a music store. Alissa picked up an electric guitar and said that when she was a kid her father taught her how to play left-handed, like Jimi Hendrix.
It was when she flipped the right-handed guitar upside down and started strumming tunelessly that Ian “kinda got the hint that she doesn’t play.”
He was too polite to say anything – although he was gobsmacked when she purchased the Gibson for $3,000.
Another time she gave him a piece of fantasy art. “I just drew this,” she said. An avowed Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast, Ian didn’t believe her.
Sure enough, a Google image search confirmed the real artist’s identity.
But Ian didn’t call out her nose stretchers until she presented her amateur mechanic bf with a pair of vehicle permits and claimed she had made a couple of “barn finds:” A ‘69 Pontiac GTO and a ‘67 Camaro. An uncle in Pictou County was storing them for her, and wouldn’t they be fun to work on together?
A skeptical Ian did a VIN search and found out the cars had been purchased at auction in the States a few years earlier.
But the clincher was the phoney ownership papers Alissa had printed up—each car was the same weight as a school bus.
When Ian confronted her, Alissa “went into victim mode” and stormed out.
A few days later, he received a text from Alissa’s aunt saying Alissa had nearly been killed in a car accident in northern Nova Scotia.
Ian was told she’d be airlifted to Dartmouth General and he would be in charge of her fate when she landed. Her aunt sent along power-of-attorney documents.
After an excruciating wait, a nurse from the hospital called to say that Alissa had walked into the ER complaining of a…headache.
But wait, what about the car accident? Er, no. Auntie? Nope. Life-flight? Not as such.
That was all too much for Ian and he broke off with Alissa.
But she wasn’t finished.
For weeks after Alissa’s near-death headache he came home to notes she’d taped on his apartment door claiming she was pregnant with his child. Sometimes the notes would even include what appeared to be a genuine paternity test.
Ian didn’t even have a photo of Alissa that he could post on the internet to warn others because she refused to let him take one. Alissa had a story for that, too: stalker ex-husband.
When police came knocking last fall, Ian was happy to assist with their inquiries. Dozens of her offences occurred when she was allegedly victimizing Ian with extortion, forgery and mail fraud, between January and March 2021.
She’s currently behind bars, no bail, until a court date next month.
