November 30, 2016

–An Ohio man was sentenced to prison for stealing more than $2 million in timber from property owned by an elderly Grove City resident. Vinton County Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey Simmons sentenced Mark Betts, 53, of McArthur, to four years in prison. Betts was also ordered to pay $2,025,088 in restitution. Betts, the owner of Betts Logging, pleaded guilty last month to cutting the trees from the victim’s property without permission and stealing the timber between April 2007 and September 2010. An investigation conducted by the Attorney General’s Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and the Vinton County Sheriff’s Office found that Betts harvested hundreds of acres of trees, valued by a forestry expert to be worth $2,025,088, from the victim’s property on Goose Creek Road and Dunkle Creek Road and then sold the timber to sawmills for more than $578,000. OH

Tagged in: Environmental Fraud,