Various online forums are packed with questions by people looking to fake their community service required as part of a court sentence, probation or graduation requirement. Community service is so easy to accumulate, and actually doing the hours gets a person all the benefits of any volunteering: references and skills for paid work, accomplishments that can look great on a résumé, a LinkedIn profile or a university application, etc. It’s not just unethical and, in some cases, a violation of court orders that leads to additional charges – it’s stupid to fake community service hours.

Are there ever consequences for faking community service for the courts? Yes. Often, it’s a felony charge from the court and a revocation of probation.

Here’s a sampling of the consequences for getting caught faking community service:

Two women, Kendricia Shaylon Tate and Jordan Lynn Brown, ordered to perform community service, went to jail in Floyd County, Georgia without bond in February 2019, charged with felonies for faking documentation for their court-ordered community service.

In September 2017, the former treasurer of the Wichita County GOP, Jonathan Paul Lyne, on probation for drug and tampering charges, was accused of faking his community supervision. He had to serve 180 days in the county jail before being transferred to a substance abuse felony punishment facility.

Illinois resident Russell Phillip was sentenced to 2 1/2 years of probation and 25 days in the sheriff’s work program in April 2017 for creating a charity that sold letters claiming completion of court-ordered community service hours. In addition to the work program, Phillip was ordered by the judge to pay about $900 in costs and pay the probation department $25 a month for the next 30 months. He operated a flower shop and also ran a program called “Flowers for Heroes” that was registered with the probation department as a place where people could do court-ordered community service.

Courts getting tougher re: online community service, a review of some of the actions courts are taking to prevent the faking of commuity service. 2017 January 12

Selling community service leads to arrest, conviction, a blog about the legal action that lead the demise of the unscrupulous Community Service Help, and about how the owner of the notorious the Caffeine Awareness Association pled guilty to a false-filing felony. 2016 July 01

A central New York woman was jailed in January 2015 for allegedly providing forged paperwork to Chester Town Court indicating she had completed community service that she had been directed to do for an earlier misdemeanor attempted criminal possession of stolen property conviction, police said. Kristen L. Kozerski, 33, of Newfield was charged with second-degree forgery and first-degree offering a false instrument for filing, both felonies, after an investigation by State Police. The arrest was the second in less than a year of someone who filed a forged community service form in Chester Town Court. Richard D. Didelot, 40, of Columbia, South Carolina, was charged in May with counts of falsifying business records and offering a false instrument for filing after Chester Town Justice James McDermott became suspicious of forms he filed and checked whether he performed community service. He pleaded guilty to second-degree offering a false instrument for filing, a misdemeanor and was fined $250 and sentenced to a conditional discharge.

Sandy Springs, Georgia Parks and Recreation Director Ronnie Young is out of a job after he admitted forging a signature on his son’s court-ordered community service form. His son, Reid Young, was sentenced to 60 hours of community service after he was arrested for underage alcohol violations. A secretary in the county probation discovered the fraud while reviewing time from Reid Young, who was ordered by the judge to redo the hours elsewhere.

Musician Chris Brown was given 1,000 hours of community labor for faking his community service in 2013.

Dominick Iervasi, an 18-year-old New City, New York resident, was first sentenced in 2010 over a motor vehicle incident, but then he faked documents, claiming he had completed 25 hours of court-ordered community service, and was charged in 2012 with two counts of first-degree offering a false instrument for filing, a felony.

Here are resources if you have been assigned community service by a court or as a requirement for graduation. And here are resources if you want community service / volunteering for university applications or just to establish yourself as a leader in your community, for whatever reason.

I blog about this issue a lot, FYI.

The Last Virtual Volunteering Guidebook offers detailed advice that would help any court understand how to evaluate the legitimacy of an online volunteering program. It’s geared towards nonprofits, charities, government programs, schools and others that want to involve online volunteers and to use the Internet to support ALL volunteers, including onsite volunteers, but any court or probation officer would find it helpful, as more and more people assigned community service need and seek legitimate, credible online volunteering options. If you are worried about how such volunteering is “real” and how you would verify such community service, this is the resource that will help you.

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site or my YouTube videos and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.