SHELTON – A former Shelton resident was sentenced Oct. 19 to nine months in federal prison after using a computer network he installed to defraud a funeral service business.

Billie Conley, Jr., 47, was sentenced on one count of wire fraud by Judge Victor A. Bolden in New Haven. Click here for a previous story.

The sentence will run concurrently to an unrelated, state conviction Conley is already serving time for, according to minutes of court proceedings. He is scheduled to be released from state prison September 2027.

An amount for restitution has not yet been set. That will be determined at a future court hearing, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut.

According to court documents, Conley was the former owner of Ridgefield Tech, LLC, through which he offered IT services. In 2023, the owner of a funeral services business hired Conley to install a computer network and video surveillance system.

When Conley installed the systems, however, he also included secret software which allowed him to access the network from afar.

Soon after the installation, the funeral business began to experience issues and outages. The owner had to pay Conley to fix the problems on multiple occasions.

Conley offered a monthly contract to the owner instead of continuing to charge by the visit. When the owner declined, Conley initiated 21 different network outages affecting the company over a nine-month period, according to court documents.

Those outages led to the company “being unable to conduct business and losing revenue,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum.

A separate company was brought in to resolve network issues which had started with Conley’s business. It was at that point Conley’s remote access was discovered and investigators got involved.

When investigators began looking into Conley, they also found he had taken about $9,000 from the funeral company’s bank account in order to pay companies he owed money to, including Verizon.

Conley was arrested in December and pled guilty to the charge of wire fraud June 1. Prosecutors had asked for a sentence of 18 months, while Conley’s attorney asked for a nine-month sentence.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Neeraj Patel, the prosecutor, noted in court documents that Conley has a long rap sheet, with 17 criminal convictions going back two decades. He said some of those convictions also began with Conley’s job as a computer technician, and that a longer sentence was needed to deter him in the future.

“Conley held himself out as an information technology consultant and used the guise of a legitimate business entity to create an appearance of trustworthiness. But he was not to be trusted,” Patel wrote.

Assistant Federal Defender Allison Kahl, the federal public defender who represented Conley, wrote that Conley has been making progress toward turning his life around while in state prison. She noted that he’s completed more than 100 hours of classes since his incarceration, including classes in a CDL program.

Kahl also included letters of support from Conley’s relatives, as well as a letter of apology he wrote to the victim, in her request for a shorter prison sentence.

Conley’s current state incarceration stems from a 2025 conviction for second-degree forgery and issuing a bad check over $2000. Those charges were unrelated to the federal case, according to the U.S. Attorney’s press release.