Nicholas Alahverdian

Nicholas Alahverdian (born July 11, 1987), also known as Nicholas Rossi and Arthur Knight, among other aliases, is an American sex offender who faked his own death in 2020.

Alahverdian alleged that he suffered abuse and negligence from the Department of Children Youth and Families (DCYF), Rhode Island's social service system. In support of this allegation, he unsuccessfully sued the DCYF in federal court in 2011, then voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit when Rhode Island waived his medical expenses debt of around US$200,000.

In January 2020, Alahverdian said that he had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. In February 2020, news outlets reported Alahverdian's death, citing his family's anonymous testimony and his obituary. The reports of his death were disputed, as they occurred after the FBI initiated a fraud investigation against him, while Rhode Island police had issued a warrant for him for failure to register as a sex offender.

In October 2021, he was identified in a hospital in Scotland while undergoing treatment for COVID-19. He was arrested that December on charges of an alleged rape in Utah in 2008, for which a sealed arrest warrant had been issued in September 2020, and other alleged crimes. In November 2022, Edinburgh Sheriff Court confirmed that the arrested man was Nicholas Rossi, despite his claims of mistaken identity. In August 2023, a sheriff ruled that he could be extradited to the United States; this was confirmed by Justice Secretary Angela Constance in October 2023, and he was extradited on January 5, 2024.

He gave up his claim of mistaken identity in a Utah court on August 23, 2024, and formally admitted to faking his death during a bail hearing on October 16 of that year.