Polson man pleads guilty to wire fraud

MISSOULA — A Polson man pled guilty to the charge of wire fraud in U.S. District Court and could be facing up to 20 years in prison.  

According to the indictment, Joshua Davis King devised a material scheme to defraud his employer Western Building Center (WBC) of Polson out of hundreds of thousands of dollars between 2006 and Jan. 29, 2011.

King began working at WBC in 2003 but Dave Ottun, WBC’s Manager in Polson has known King since the fourth grade.  Although, Ottun said that the two led different lives outside of work, King was considered a trusted employee.  “He was a key employee and because of that we did not investigate him well enough,” Ottun said. 

King was employed as the manager of the tool department of WBC, and had been given authority to order tools, goods and supplies on behalf of WBC from WBC’s suppliers according to the indictment. 

It was further part of the scheme to defraud that King, when placing orders for WBC, would add additional items to the order. According to the indictment these additional items included Dewalt 9 pack combo kits and Makita 4 piece tool kits. King would leave these items off of the inventory after receiving them from suppliers according to the indictment. 

King then advertised the stolen goods on Ebay under his personal screen name. He then sold the items to individual Ebay users, and in conjunction with PayPal, collected the proceeds from the stolen goods according to the indictment.

“He was very methodical in his routine, he took the same tools so the barcodes would match up,” Ottun said. When the company began to notice the missing inventory, King emailed his resignation to Ottun. “The incident has had a huge effect on the corporate structure,” Ottun said, “it has caused the corporation to tighten inventory and put more policy in place.” 

Sentencing is set for Nov. 14 at 9 a.m in Missoula.