Tim Dog confirmed dead after being accused of faking death

Rapper Tim Dog was dead when a warrant was issued for his arrest in 2013, according to a death certificate filed in Georgia.

The rapper – whose real name was Timothy Blair – was accused of swindling women out of thousands of dollars.

He was best known for the 1990s song F— Compton that criticized West Coast rappers.

Tim Dog was sentenced in August 2011 to serve 14 days in jail and five years on probation for swindling $32,000 from a woman who met him on an online dating site four years earlier. He was ordered to pay about $19,000 in restitution.

Numerous media organizations last year reported or referred to his death from diabetes complications, many citing the hip-hop magazine The Source. That story later disappeared from the magazine’s website.

Sparse obituary information, lack of a burial site and no known death certificate led to talk in hip-hop circles that the rapper had faked his death in February 2013.

One swindling victim from Mississippi told prosecutors she stopped receiving restitution payments around the same time Timothy Blair was reported dead.

In May 2013, DeSoto County prosecutor Steven Jubera said that since he had no proof Timothy Blair was dead, he had to assume the rapper was alive. Steven Jubera sought an arrest warrant, and a judge approved it.

Tim Dog was from New York but had been living in the Atlanta area.

A death certificate from DeKalb County, Georgia, shows that a Timothy Blair with the same birth date and Social Security number listed in the Mississippi court documents died on February 14, 2013. The document, first reported by Dateline NBC and obtained by The Associated Press on September 16, 2014,, shows the 46-year-old died at a hospice center but does not list a cause of death.

The Mississippi woman who accused Timothy Blair of scamming her was featured in 2012 on Dateline NBC, along with other women he had persuaded to give him money.

Esther Pilgrim, of Southaven, Mississippi, told the program she opened credit cards to get money to invest in Tim Dog albums that Timothy Blair said he was producing.

After meeting online, the two spent time together in person at Timothy Blair’s home in Atlanta.

In the Dateline program, Timothy Blair said Esther Pilgrim wrecked the record deal and cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars.