A financial advisor in Georgia has been sent to prison and fined for illegally obtaining millions of dollars in Covid-19 relief funds.
Paul Kwak, 65, a financial advisor in Braselton, Ga., was sentenced to prison for three years and four months, followed by three years of “supervised release,” last week by a federal court in the northern district of Georgia for illegally obtaining millions of federal dollars during the Covid-19 pandemic.
He will also forfeit more than $1.6 million from bank accounts associated with the fraud, pay an additional $1,198,300 in restitution, and give up three homes and a Mercedes he purchased with proceeds from the scheme.
Kwak, who is not listed in Finra’s’s BrokerCheck, pleaded guilty to the charges in June. His sentence was handed down last week.
According to the indictment, Kwak collected more than $2 million in fraudulent disaster-relief claims. He allegedly did this by submitting dozens of phony applications for Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDLs) in 2020 and 2021. EIDL was a federal program created by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act of 2020, a $2 trillion package of emergency assistance during the worst of the pandemic. EIDL was funded and managed by the U.S. Small Business Administration.
That federal agency, the FBI, and the Office of Inspector General, a federal oversight office, jointly investigated the case.
Successfully filing false applications isn’t exactly easy, according to prosecutors. Each application must provide detailed information, including the amount of revenue the small business generated in the preceding 12 months and the number of employees. According to court documents, the applicant must also certify that the data is correct and that he or she is legally eligible to apply for an EIDL, which Kwak wasn’t.
Federal prosecutors charged that Kwak and his co-conspirators submitted their fake applications in the names of made-up shell companies with no employees or business activities. Some of the applications allegedly used the names of people living in South Korea, who may have been fabricated as well.
“Not only did Kwak defraud the government by applying for relief funds for companies that did not exist, but he also recruited and taught others how to do the same,” said Keri Farley, special agent in charge of FBI Atlanta, in a statement. “Let this sentence be a message that the FBI will continue to hold accountable anyone who abuses taxpayer dollars and diverts them from people that actually need them.”
Kwak is also alleged to have posted videos on his YouTube channel that encouraged others to follow his example. According to charges issued by federal prosecutors, one May 2020 clip promised “disaster assistance you don’t have to pay back,” only in Korean, not English.
“When the government stepped in to help the millions of Americans suffering economically during the pandemic, some sought an opportunity to exploit the system and enrich themselves,” said U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Buchanan, in a statement. “Kwak not only submitted his own fraudulent applications, but he recruited others to his scheme, resulting in millions of dollars of fraudulent applications to the SBA’s relief program.”
His co-conspirators—only Joosoo Choi-Bang, Jon Sun Hun, and Sook Hee Kim were named in court documents, without other identifying information—had already pleaded guilty and were sentenced to prison. Choi-Bang is serving one year and six months in prison, followed by one year of supervised release. Hun and Kim are in prison for two years, followed by a year of supervised release.
“Profiteering off federal government relief programs intended to support American small businesses is inexcusable,” said the Small Business Administration’s Amaleka McCall-Brathwaite, in a statement. She added her thanks to authorities for “seeing justice served.”
The Small Business Administration and the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment further.