‘Brazen Fraud’: Federal Prosecutors Excoriate Fallen Star Entrepreneur Charlie Javice, Now on Trial for Faking Customers, Tricking Chase Bank

Closing arguments were heard at the trial of the fallen star entrepreneur, Charlie Javice, who founded Frank, a start-up company that claimed to drastically simplify college financial aid applications, and her former chief growth officer, Olivier Amar, at a Manhattan federal courthouse on Wednesday. “Brazen fraud” is what federal prosecutors alleged Ms. Javice, 32, and Mr. Amar, 49, employed to trick JP Morgan Chase & Co. into believing that Frank had over 4 million customers when, in fact, it had only about 350,000. “They lied because they knew it was the one thing that made the company valuable,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicholas Chiuchiolo told the jury during closing arguments on Wednesday, referring to millions of customers that Ms. Javice and her co-conspirator, Mr. Amar, allegedly fabricated. “They kept up the fraud… They continued to lie until they got caught… And they agreed to do it together.” JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in America with an illustrious history, bought Ms. Javice’s start-up in the summer of 2021 for $175 million, and according to prosecutors Ms. Javice stood to gain over $45 million from the sale. After Chase discovered, belatedly, that most of the customers they thought Frank had did not exist, the banking behemoth sued Ms. Javice in December, 2022 and she was arrested the following April.“Charlie Javice and Olivier Amar sold Frank for $175 million worth of lies,” Mr. Chiuchiolo alleged. The defendants are charged with conspiracy to commit wire and bank fraud, bank fraud, wire fraud, and securities fraud. If convicted they each could face up to 30 years behind bars. The case has been of some embarrassment to Chase, some observers have said, whose sophisticated bankers failed to do basic due diligence before writing Ms. Javice a nine-figure check. Observers say the bank appears to have been starstruck by a celebrity entrepreneur like Ms. Javice, an Ivy League graduate still in her twenties at the time, whose business claimed to have found a cure to a major societal ill: the Byzantine educational financial aid system.That is all now in ruins with former coworkers turning on each other. Mr. Amar’s defense attorney, Matthew Menchel, tried to separate his client from the former CEO, telling the jury that Ms. Javice was “the head of the company,” while Mr. Amar was just “an employee,” and that prosecutors were trying to “lump us together as if we are the same person, when we’re not.” The two defendants sat at separate tables, each surrounded by an army of defense attorneys. During the breaks in between the closing arguments, which lasted the entire day, Ms. Javice, who was released on a $2 million bond, walked in and out of the courtroom, her long brown tousled hair freely flowing over her shoulders.The petite woman, who wore a light-blue sweater and a black cardigan, smiled frequently, possibly attempting to keep up a good spirit. Raised in Westchester County, an affluent suburb north of New York City, by a father, who worked at a hedge fund, and a mother, who is a life-coach and a former teacher, Ms. Javice attended a private French-American school and later graduated from Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She founded her start-up around 2017 and two years later appeared on Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list and Crain’s New York’s 40 under 40. She relocated to Miami, Florida, after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, where she resides today. Her online platform offered to guide students through the process of applying for financial aid by helping to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid form, a federal government form, available free of charge and used by students all over the country to apply for financial aid for college or graduate school. Ms. Javice told Fox Business in 2017 that through her website students would be able to fill out the form “in under 4 minutes,” and “on the phone.” Ms. Javice secured funding from venture capitalists, such as the Israeli-American Michael Eisenberg, who led the investment for the website development platform Wix.com, and Apollo Management CEO Marc Rowan, one of New York’s financial titans, who was also called to testify during the five-week long trial. Prosecutors allege that Ms. Javice began to look to sell her company around 2021, and told the two banks that were interested in the purchase, JP Morgan Chase and Capital One, “that Frank had over 4 million users,” Mr. Chiuchiolo said on Wednesday. But in reality, the company only had around 350,000. Capital One stepped away from the purchase, and when negotiations with JP Morgan Chase intensified, and the bank sought to verify the amount of users and the data collected on them, Ms. Javice, prosecutors allege, asked one of her employees to create a list of 4 million students, 10 times as many as her company had actually helped. The employee, Patrick Vovor, refused, saying he “would not do anything illegal,” Mr. Chiuchiolo told the jury. Mr. Vovor testified during trial and told the jury that Ms. Javice tried to persuade him. “She said: ‘Don’t worry. I don’t want to end up in an orange jumpsuit,’” he said on the witness stand. Prosecutors allege that she then hired an associate professor of mathematics at Queens College, Adam Kapelner, and paid him $18,000 to create fake names, fake home addresses and especially fake birthdays, because the bank needed to make sure that the company’s users were not underage. Mr. Chiuchiolo argued that Ms. Javice and Mr. Amar “generated fake data for 4 million people who did not exist … The names, phone numbers, emails? All were fake.”The prosecutor explained that the bank was interested in the purchase because it saw millions of new potential customers for future account holders, credit cards or loans. After the deal went through, employees at the bank asked for Frank’s customer email list to begin a marketing campaign. But alas, only a small fraction of the emails they sent went through. “The names are made up,” Mr. Kapelner testified in court earlier during the trial, the Wall Street Journal reported, but he added that the bank would have noticed had they done “basic diligence.”“Reasonable doubt lives here in this case,” Ms. Javice’s defense attorney, Jose Baez, argued for his client. Mr. Baez, famous for winning acquittals for Casey Anthony and Aaron Hernandez, both accused of murder, told the jury that “making justice is like making sausage. Once you see how it’s made you never want to eat it again.” Mr. Baez said prosecutors were “cherry picking” which documents, emails, and text messages to present at trial in order to prove their case. He said the jury should rather focus on “the conflict of evidence.”He showed the jury a picture of Ms. Javice’s biography, which the bank had seen, and which explicitly stated that her company, Frank, “had helped more than 300,000 students receive 1 billion in financial aid.” “The numbers were everywhere on the world wide web.” Mr. Baez argued. The 4 million users that Ms. Javice had claimed to have, he said, were not customers, but people who visited the website to access information on loan applications, which her platform provided, such as links, articles and blog entries. People visited the site not just to apply for the loans. The 4 million number of website traffickers, he argued, was supported by Google Analytics.Mr. Menchel, who represents Mr. Amar, corroborated this, when he reminded the jury that Mr. Rowan, the Apollo grandee whom he described as “a heavy hitter,” had testified that “users, website visitors, customers are one and the same“ and that “anyone who came to the website was valuable.” Though Mr. Menchel often cited Mr. Baez’s arguments, his closing statement may have harmed Ms. Javice. He insisted that his client, Mr. Amar, was not included in the agreement signed with the bank, that he was even left out of critical conferences and numerous emails, and that several witnesses testified the information about Frank had been provided to them by Ms. Javice. The jury is expected to begin deliberations on Thursday.

‘Brazen Fraud’: Federal Prosecutors Excoriate Fallen Star Entrepreneur Charlie Javice, Now on Trial for Faking Customers, Tricking Chase Bank

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