A MAN from Bolton who had thousands of pounds transferred to him by a friend who engineered an "bizarre2 scam spent the cash on drugs and prostitutes.

Twenty-eight-year-old council worker Matthew Ravey, has been jailed after having fraudulently transferred £80k to friends - including Jason Hurst from Bolton - while working for Rochdale Borough Council.

Ravey, of Weir Road, Rochdale, also created insolvency documents for himself and friends in an attempt to avoid reimbursing payday loan companies he was in debt to.

He was hired as a business rates officer at the council in October 2013, earning just under £18,000.

In June 2016, an employee looked into a business rates refund that 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 co-conspirators Richard Rigby, aged 29, of Windmill Court, Rochdale and Andrew Foster , aged 32 of Smithybridge Road, Littleborough respectively.

Among the transfers were two payments totalling £3,274 to Hurst, aged 48, of Chorley Old Road, Bolton, who later admitted in police interview to spending the money on cocaine and prostitutes.

Hurst was sentenced at a previous hearing at Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court in November to complete 100 hours unpaid work after pleading guilty to one count of theft.

There were seven transfers to Michael Frames, aged 28, of Milbury Drive, Littleborough 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, aged 27, of Hurstead Road, Milnrow, and Rigby.

Ravey’s works computer was also found to contain fraudulent insolvency documents.

The investigation revealed that he used these 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 significantly reduced.

He also offered this service to his friends – emailing one: “I have used it on three loans I had in the past. Two have been written off completely…BOOM xx.”

The fraud was worth a total £80,517 and the loss to Rochdale Borough Council was worth £76,308.

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 fool-proof 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.

“After being confronted, he even tried to deny he’d done anything wrong – despite the paper chain from his computer clearly implicated him and his co-conspirators in his desperately flawed con job.

“Let’s not forget this was public money. Everyone – not least taxpayers in Rochdale – should be disgusted by his actions.”

Today the following men were sentenced at Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court: Ravey pleaded guilty to three counts of fraud and one count of theft and was sentenced to one year and six months.

Frames pleaded guilty to one count of money laundering and was sentenced to complete 100 hours unpaid work.

Foster pleaded guilty to one count of money laundering and was sentenced to complete 54 hours unpaid work.

Rigby was sentenced at a previous hearing at Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court on 4 February 2019 to complete 64 hours unpaid work after pleading guilty to one count of money laundering.

Merriman was sentenced at a previous hearing at Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court on 8 January 2019 to complete 80 hours unpaid work after pleading guilty to one count of money laundering.