High Point man gets 36 months for stealing ammo, tactical gear

A High Point theft that started as a workplace complaint ended with Mbaye Fall receiving 36 months in federal prison after investigators tied him to more than 26,000 rounds of stolen ammunition and other weapons-related property worth over $500,000.

Fall was also ordered to pay restitution after the case, which began in 2024 when a local business owner filed a theft complaint through High Point Police Department’s online reporting system. What investigators uncovered was much larger than a single missing cache of ammo. The stolen property included ammunition, body armor, helmets and firearm components, turning the case into a major inventory loss for a High Point business and a public-safety concern for Guilford County.

Search warrants at homes and storage units later turned up several thousand rounds of ammunition, 13 firearms, firearm accessories, body armor and about $30,000 in cash. That haul showed investigators were not dealing with an ordinary property crime. Ammunition and tactical gear can move quickly through illegal channels, and the scale of the recovery helped explain why detectives kept pushing the case long after the original complaint was filed.

A later account said investigators used mobile-device analysis and online marketplace activity to expand the probe, which stretched beyond North Carolina into other jurisdictions. The federal case also drew support from the High Point Police Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, according to Dan Bishop, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina, who announced the sentence.

For High Point, the case underscores how a single internal theft report can expose a wider weakness in inventory controls when a business handles ammunition and tactical gear. The loss hit a local employer, and the recovery showed how quickly weapons-related goods can become a law-enforcement problem that reaches far beyond one storefront or storage room.