Meet Charlie Javice: 30-Year-Old Woman Who Conned JPMorgan

JPMorgan Chase & Co. is a multinational financial services company from New York that leads the world when it comes to assisting the financial needs of small and big businesses. The company would have never thought that a 30-year-old startup founder would fool them with her full-proof plan.

In 2019, JPMorgan acquired Frank, a student aid platform that supports users in the loan application process and makes it faster and easier. Of course, JPMorgan found the platform interesting and credible as it was supported by big names in the industry and the app was doing well as it had around 300k happy customers. However, JPMorgan Chase soon came to realise that the numbers and the customer were all fake and it was all because of Frank's 30-year-old founder and CEO Charlie Javice. Here's all you need to know about her.

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Who Is Charlie Javice?

Charlie Javice completed her high school diploma from the French American School of New York. She then joined Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania to pursue a Bachelor of Science in 2010 and studied Finance, Operations, Information & Decisions and Law. She also allegedly went to Tel Aviv University in Israel for her education. While in Wharton, Javice founded a startup called PoverUP in 2010 that aimed at bringing together students, professionals and scholars to learn online which ran for 5 years. In 2016, at 25 years of age, Javice founded Frank, a platform to help students in the loan application process.

Many big names in the industry like SWAT Equity Partners, Chegg, Marc Rowan and Gingerbread Capital reportedly supported her application and in 2019, she convinced JPMorgan to buy her startup for 175 million dollars. With the financial services company acquiring the platform, Javice received around 10 million dollars which she later negotiated and raised to 20 million dollars and was also made a managing director at JPMorgan Chase. In 2019, she was also named in Forber 30 Under 30 list for her achievements.

To crack the deal, Javice and Olivier Amar, chief growth officer of Frank, claimed that the application had 300k customers in 2019 which went up to 5 million after the merger. However, when JPMorgan asked for the data of the customers for marketing purposes, both Javice and Amar resisted claiming that it would be a breach of privacy. When they finally gave the data and the company sent out emails to the users, it was found that all the users were fake.

It was found that Javice and Amar had paid around 18,000 dollars to a New York-based data science professor to create 4.6 million fake accounts from the data of a few customers of Frank. They also spent 105,000 dollars to buy student data from ASL Marketing and had the accounts verified by a third-party vendor. In 2022, JPMorgan fired Amar and Javice and filed a fraud case against them for fooling them into buying their startup by showing fake customer data.