Businessman convicted of blowing COVID funds on gambling debts

A federal jury has found a 54-year-old Tampa man guilty of using $500,000 in COVID relief funds to pay off gambling debts and his girlfriend’s credit cards.

Barrett Purvis faces 20 years in federal prison when he is sentenced Aug. 12. He was convicted of money laundering and wire fraud.

Unlike many of the fraud cases brought by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida, this one differs in that the Purvis obtained the funds legally and for a legitimate small business.

What’s not different from many of the cases is that he used the money on himself.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice and court papers, Purvis was president of the marketing company Big Man Promotions when he applied for a $499,000 Economic Injury Disaster Loan from the Small Business Administration in 2021.

In the application, Purvis wrote that the loan money would be used only for working capital and to alleviate hardships caused by the pandemic.

The loan was approved, and the money deposited into his bank account May 3, 2021. 

But rather than using the money as agreed to, Purvis spent about half of the funds on a gambling debt and the rest on other personal debt. That includes debt incurred on his girlfriend’s three credit cards.

And he did this quickly. On May 4, he pulled out $112,000 from the account the relief funds were deposited into and within two weeks of getting the loans he had spent nearly all the proceeds on personal expense.

The case was investigated by the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation division and is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Candace Garcia Rich.

In January, the local U.S. Attorney's Office announced it indicted more than 21 people last year for attempting to illegally collect more than $15 million in federal relief funds.

Those indictments raised to 77 the number of fraud cases — totaling $85 million — that federal prosecutors locally brought against defendants who have tried to scam the federal government out of relief funds set aside for people in need during the pandemic.