Rotorua man who gambled Covid relief funds sentenced to home detention

A Rotorua man spent some of the $37,000 in Covid relief money he received on gambling and personal expenses. Photo / Christine Cornege

A Rotorua man has been sentenced to home detention after he gambled away Covid-19 relief money he had scammed through a made-up business.

Glen Allan Rumble appeared in the Rotorua District Court on April 23 and was sentenced to 10 months’ home detention and 100 hours’ community work for defrauding the Government.

Over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, Rumble gambled and personally spent $37,066.15 in relief money he had received for a fake business.

He had applied for a total of $53,164.13 under three different schemes, the Small Business Cashflow Scheme (SBCS), the Covid-19 Resurgence Support Payment (RSP) and the Covid Support Payment (CSP).

The relief programme was launched to support New Zealand businesses with their core expenses throughout the pandemic.

Rumble set up the company RumbleboysNZ in September 2020 but he never traded under that name or his own and had connected the firm’s Inland Revenue details to his personal bank account.

Rumble was convicted on representative charges for electronically filing applications for the three Covid-19 relief schemes when he was not entitled to.

He was also convicted of two charges for using an electronically filed GST return to get money he wasn’t entitled to, relating to fraudulent GST returns he had made.

In 2020, the Government announced the CSP scheme, followed in 2021 by the RSP and in 2022 the SBCS.

All three were implemented using a “high trust” model so businesses could get help as they faced adverse effects from the pandemic.

Rumble set up RumbleboysNZ with him as the sole director and shareholder.

He applied for all three forms of pandemic relief over time and stated RumbleboysNZ was in business and entitled to the payments. He also filed two GST returns.