Charlie Javice in Manhattan federal court in June 2023.
New York Daily News/Getty Images
Charlie Javice faces fraud charges over allegations she lied about her app’s subscriber numbers.
The allegedly inflated numbers helped her sell her startup to JPMorgan Chase for $175 million.
A former classmate wondered why she didn’t immediately flee the country after the sale.
Classmates of Charlie Javice told Fortune they were shocked by allegations she defrauded JPMorgan Chase for $175 million – and one wondered why she didn’t immediately flee the country.
The 31-one-year-old — who founded a now-shuttered app called Frank that helped students navigate college financial aid — is facing civil and criminal charges alleging she lied to JPMorgan Chase about the number of subscribers her app had.
Before the bank bought her company for a whopping $175 million, Javice repeatedly said Frank had over 4 million customers, when in reality it had about 300,000, according to prosecutors.
One of Javice’s classmates from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania told Fortune that if Javice did commit such a lucrative fraud, “why [wasn’t] she on the first airplane out of the country once the money hits the bank? That’s my internal reasoning and doubt.”
Javice sold Frank to JPMorgan Chase in September 2021, and as part of the acquisition, she joined the bank as its head of student solutions, Fortune reported. In January 2022, JPMorgan Chase realized that the subscriber numbers were inflated, and Javice was fired by the end of the year.
“Why would you poke the bear? If I sold a company to JPMorgan Chase, I would explain everything, everything [that] I expensed including that salad that I bought at Sweetgreen that one time. Everything. I would be scared shitless,” the anonymous classmate told Fortune.
Fortune spoke to other former classmates who said they were “baffled” by the amateur nature of the alleged fraud, which included paying a data science professor $18,000 to fabricate a list of customers using fake data, Fortune reported.
Javice is currently out of jail on a $2 million bond, according to Fortune. She is being charged with securities fraud, wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy.