Willy and Buck Forsythe are brothers who often engage in shady business deals and regularly swindle honest people out of their money. Willy and Buck have decided to take their business to a new level. There is a small hardware store in town with a good reputation for honesty and friendly service. With the large amounts of money they have accumulated from other schemes, Willy and Buck decide to buy the hardware store. They make the owner an offer he can't refuse, and they are soon in the hardware business.
As new managers of the store, Willy and Buck make some changes. They begin to order bigger shipments from suppliers, paying them off promptly, using money acquired through loans. They sell off a lot of these shipments at cost to their unruly friend, Billy the Kid. As orders get larger and payments remain prompt, the suppliers are willing to extend more and more credit to the hardware store. Also, because it appears that business is good, the bank is willing to lend more money.
Things are going just as planned for our crooked friends, Willy and Buck. Just as they had planned to do all along, when they have a lot of money on loan from the bank and have just sold huge amounts of inventory to Billy that they had purchased on credit, they file for bankruptcy. The suppliers and the bank are perplexed. Upon investigation, they find that Willy and Buck have neither the money to pay them back nor the inventory to liquidate in order to pay them. Willy and Buck have successfully "sold" their inventory or hidden their cash in other bank accounts, so it appears they don't have the means to pay back their creditors. What kind of scheme are Willy and Buck involved in, and how could the bank and the suppliers have detected it sooner?