Contractor Javan King bags jail term for stealing 4,800 U.S. govt phones
Javan King, 42, of Laurel, Maryland, has been sentenced in U.S. District Court to 12 months and one day in prison in connection with his theft of more than 4,800 government cell phones when he worked for the Department of Justice.
Mr King pleaded guilty on February 10, 2026, before Judge Jia M. Cobb to one count of mail fraud.
In addition to the 12-month prison term, the judge ordered Mr King to serve two years of supervised release and ordered him to pay $1,319,172.85 in restitution. Federal prosecutors had requested a 24-month prison term.
Between 2021 and 2025, Mr King worked as an information technology contractor for the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice.
During that period, he defrauded the DOJ out of more than $1.3 million by successfully requesting that the department order thousands of mobile devices it did not need.
After the phones were shipped to Mr King at the DOJ, he sent them to phone reselling businesses. In total, the businesses paid him more than $1.3 million for the phones.
He spent the proceeds on a variety of things, including gambling at MGM casinos and on FanDuel, vacations, private school tuition, and a down payment on a $92,000 Range Rover SUV.
The scheme came to light when a private citizen in Kentucky contacted the DOJ in late August 2025, noting that she had learned that an iPhone that she had purchased online belonged to the department.
Mr King acknowledged that his scheme caused the Department of Justice to suffer an actual loss of more than $1.3 million due to fees it paid AT&T for unnecessary phone lines and phones.
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