WORKMATES TRAPPED £73,000 TOWN HALL FRAUDSTER
‘MASTERMIND’ FUNNELLED CASH TO PAY OFF LOANS – AND BUY DRUGS AND SEX FOR PALS
A DELUDED debt-ridden council worker – who fancied himself a ‘criminal mastermind’ with a foolproof get-rich-quick scheme – funnelled more than £70,000 to pals so they could write-off loans and pay for cocaine and sex.
Matthew Ravey diverted cash from town hall accounts, first for himself to avoid payday loan companies, then for friends. The Rochdale council officer emailed one mate: “I have used it on three loans I had in the past. Two have been written off completely...BOOM xx..”
Police said Ravey, 28, thought he had come up with a ‘foolproof’ plan to ‘get rich while avoiding his debtors.’
But one daft mistake saw the scheme unravel – he used his work computer and work email.
He has now been jailed for a year and six months having admitted three counts of fraud and one count of theft.
Minshull Street Crown Court heard Ravey, of Weir Road, Rochdale, created false insolvency documents for himself and friends while working at the council, in an attempt to avoid reimbursing payday loan companies he was in debt to.
His career at the town hall began in October 2013, when he was hired as a council business rates officer, earning just less than £18,000.
In June 2016, an employee looked into a business rates refund Ravey had processed after noticing it by chance.
Ravey had applied a period of empty property relief, totalling £4,208, on a company named Kinetic Security Products Ltd, despite records showing the company dissolved in 2014.
He created a new bank account and creditor address associated with the business that in fact belonged to coconspirators Richard Rigby, 29, and Andrew Foster, 31.
When confronted by a fellow employee, Ravey initially claimed he was correcting an existing error. When it was pointed out there was no error, he began denying he ever accessed the account. An internal investigation was launched and it was found that Ravey had altered banking and addresses of other businesses to make 26 separate fraudulent transfers between January 2015 and June 2016.
Among the transfers were two payments totalling £3,274 to Jason Hurst, 48, who later admitted in police interview to spending the money on cocaine and sex workers. There were seven transfers to Michael Frames, 28, of just under £15,000. Frames was an NHS employee at the time, and arranged the fraud using his NHS email account. He has since left the NHS.
In total, £73,232 was transferred to his friends including Daniel Merriman, 27, and Rigby. Ravey’s work computer was found to contain fraudulent insolvency documents. And emails were recovered incriminating him.
The investigation revealed that he used those documents to obtain arrangements from loan companies to avoid paying off what he had borrowed, either having the loans written off or repayments on them reduced.
Following the hearing, Detective Constable Sarah Langley, of GMP’s Fraud Disruption Team, said: “It’s clear from correspondence that Ravey imagined himself as some sort of criminal mastermind who’d concocted a foolproof plan to get rich while avoiding his debtors.
“But frankly, the decision to use his employer’s email address to orchestrate it was one of many frankly bizarre factors in his ill-considered scam.”
Frames, of Milbury Drive, Littleborough, pleaded guilty to one count of money laundering and was sentenced to complete 100 hours of unpaid work.
Foster, of, Smithybridge Road, Littleborough, pleaded guilty to one count of money laundering and was sentenced to complete 54 hours of unpaid work.
Rigby, of Windmill Court, Rochdale, was sentenced at a previous hearing at Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court, on February 4, to complete 64 hours of unpaid work after pleading guilty to one count of money laundering. Hurst, of Chorley Old Road, Bolton, was sentenced at a previous hearing, on November 21 last year, to complete 100 hours of unpaid work after pleading guilty to one count of theft. Merriman, of Hurstead Road, Milnrow, was also sentenced at a previous hearing, on January 8, to complete 80 hours of unpaid work after pleading guilty to one count of money laundering.