A Koreatown rideshare driver is facing federal charges alleging he fraudulently obtained more than $2 million in COVID-19 pandemic business-relief loans he is suspected of using to buy bitcoins and other cryptocurrency, officials announced Wednesday.
Bruce Choi, 34, was arrested Tuesday at San Francisco International Airport after arriving on a flight from Japan.
Choi is charged in Los Angeles federal court with four counts of wire fraud affecting a financial institution and one count of transactional money laundering. He is expected to be arraigned in the coming weeks.
According to the October 2025 indictment, which was unsealed Wednesday, Choi schemed to defraud the U.S. Small Business Administration and financial institutions out of government funds aimed to help businesses weather the pandemic’s economic fallout.
Representing himself as chief executive and owner of a business called Premier Republic, Choi applied for a nearly $2 million Paycheck Protection Program loan. In support of the application, Choi falsely claimed that Premier had an average monthly payroll of $798,000, was in operation in mid-February 2020, and paid salaries and payroll taxes, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
In fact, federal prosecutors say, Premier was a fictional entity that neither had business operations nor hired anyone.
To support his claim that Premier was a genuine business, Choi submitted to a lender several fraudulent documents, including a fake 2019 individual tax return that claimed his company received gross receipts of nearly $11.8 million in 2019 and made a gross profit of nearly $9.6 million that year, court papers allege.
As a result of his scheme, the victim lender disbursed nearly $2 million to Choi and the U.S. Treasury disbursed a $10,000 Economic Injury Disaster Loan advance. Choi later wired proceeds from his scheme to a Kraken cryptocurrency exchange account.
Pursuant to a court-issued warrant, federal prosecutors have seized nearly 40 bitcoins and other cryptocurrency as part of the investigation.
If convicted, Choi would face up to 30 years in federal prison for each wire fraud count and up to 10 years in federal prison on the money laundering count, prosecutors noted.