A former Department of Justice contractor who admitted stealing and reselling thousands of government-issued cell phones was sentenced Tuesday to a little more than a year in federal prison after prosecutors said he blew much of the money on gambling.

Javan King, 42, of Laurel, Maryland, worked as an information technology contractor in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. Investigators said he used that position to order phones the department did not actually need, then quietly sold them to phone resellers for cash. Prosecutors estimated the scheme cost the government more than $1.3 million and generated roughly the same amount in personal payments to King.

Justice Department contractor luxury spending and gambling fueled phone fraud

According to prosecutors, the operation ran from 2021 through 2025 and expanded after the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted normal oversight inside the department. Court filings said the departure of another employee left King with “full control of the device management process.”

Investigators said King regularly submitted fake requests for government phones, claiming they were intended for incoming attorneys, political appointees, or newly hired employees. In one example highlighted by prosecutors, King requested 164 new iPhone 15 lines in June 2025, including 15 labeled only as “extra.”

The Justice Department approved 163 of those phones through AT&T, and the devices were shipped by FedEx to King at DOJ offices in Washington, according to charging documents. Prosecutors said he then sold at least 162 of them to a Tennessee reseller for $170 each.

Court records show King ultimately sold about 4,700 phones to at least nine different reselling companies. One buyer alone purchased more than 3,200 devices and paid King over $950,000 through PayPal accounts connected to the scheme.

Investigators also discovered that King used a personal Yahoo email account to arrange sales and shipments. By the time federal agents searched the account, many of the messages had already been deleted, though prosecutors later recovered copies from one of the resellers.

When one reseller questioned how he obtained such a large number of phones, King tried to explain it away. “I guess that my issue is, I purchase unclaimed storage units that haven’t been paid as my profession,” King wrote in the message cited by prosecutors.

The fraud unraveled in August 2025 after a woman in Kentucky contacted the Justice Department because an iPhone she purchased online was still tied to the agency.

During a January 2026 meeting with prosecutors, King admitted what he had done and acknowledged that he had spent nearly all of the money, “most of it on gambling, specifically at MGM casinos and FanDuel,” according to the government’s sentencing memo. Prosecutors also said he used the proceeds for vacations, private school tuition, and a $92,000 Range Rover purchased shortly before he lost his job.

“King’s theft of thousands of government phones was a brazen betrayal of the public trust that drained taxpayers of more than a million dollars,” U.S. Attorney Pirro said in a statement. “He then squandered the stolen money on gambling, luxury vacations, and a high-end vehicle. He will now be required to repay the very funds he siphoned from the American taxpayer and serve a prison sentence for his crimes.”

King pleaded guilty February 10 to one count of mail fraud before the U.S. District Judge Jia M. Cobb. Prosecutors pushed for a two-year prison sentence, arguing he had transformed the DOJ phone procurement system into “a personal slush fund generator.”

Cobb sentenced him to 12 months and one day in prison, followed by two years of supervised release. King was also ordered to repay $1,319,172.85. Court filings show he has attended Gamblers Anonymous meetings while on pretrial release and told investigators he has been trying to quit gambling.

Featured image: U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation via WikiCommons / CC BY-SA 4.0

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