From Ivy League star to $175M fraudster: The prodigy facade of CEO who fooled world’s largest bank JPMorgan Chase

Once considered a business prodigy, Javice attended the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School at 17, started a company at 19 and made it into Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list at 26.

In September 2021, Javice hit another career peak when JPMorgan Chase, the world’s largest bank by market capitalization, announced it was acquiring her student financial aid company, Frank, for over a hundred million dollars.

But just a few months later, the lender called the acquisition a "huge mistake" and filed a lawsuit against Javice, accusing her of fraud.

The phantom list

Around 2017, at just 24 years old and only a few years out of Wharton, Javice started Frank, which aimed to simplify the process of applying for college financial aid for students in the U.S.

With her charm and confidence, Javice quickly impressed major investors, including Marc Rowan, CEO of asset manager firm Apollo Global Management. Her efforts paid off and Frank quickly secured $20 million in funding.

By early 2021, Javice claimed the platform had grown to 4.25 million users, proudly calling it "the leading and fastest-growing college financial planning platform" that had helped millions of students from more than 6,000 schools reduce their tuition costs.

Those figures caught the eye of executives at JPMorgan Chase, who saw Frank as a promising addition to their expanding fintech portfolio.

After multiple rounds of negotiation, the bank requested that Frank provide a list of its customers and their data, including names, phone numbers, email addresses and home addresses. Javice initially resisted, arguing that sharing such data would violate user privacy. But as the acquisition talks progressed, she relented and handed over the list, paving the way for the deal to go through.

After the deal closed, Javice earned more than $21 million from the sale of her equity in Frank and was also entitled to a $20 million retention bonus. She also became a managing director at JPMorgan as part of the deal.

She was hailed as one of the most successful young women in fintech, a symbol of the new generation of tech-driven entrepreneurs. That, however, did not last. Not long after the acquisition, JPMorgan noticed something was off.

During an outreach effort, the bank emailed 400,000 names from the list provided by Javice. Roughly 70% of them were returned and just 1% were opened, alarming executives across the company, as reported by the New York Times.

A deeper investigation uncovered the truth: Javice had given them a fabricated list to make her company look far bigger than it actually was. The bank then filed a lawsuit against Javice in 2022, accusing her of fraud.

A polished façade

Charlie Javice exits, following her guilty verdict in a criminal trial on charges of defrauding JPMorgan Chase & Co., at Manhattan federal court in New York City, U.S., March 28, 2025. Photo by Reuters

Born in 1993 in New York, Javice grew up in one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods. Her father has worked on Wall Street for more than 35 years, her mother was a teacher and her brother held a senior role at a well-known fast-food chain.

From a young age, Javice was surrounded by privilege and opportunity. She attended an elite bilingual English-French middle and high school where tuition exceeded $40,000 a year. Later, at Wharton, she majored in finance and law and graduated in just three years.

Even as a student, she showed a strong passion for entrepreneurship. In April 2011, she founded a microfinance platform called PoverUp that aimed to "end poverty with the click of a mouse."

The platform connected students with microfinance institutions and social enterprises. It claimed that students could contribute small sums of money to support entrepreneurs in developing countries, helping them start or expand their businesses. They could also choose from different funding projects and gain hands-on experience working with organizations.

Her work on PoverUp earned her a place on Fast Company’s 2011 list of the 100 Most Creative People. Inc. Magazine also named the platform one of the "11 coolest college startups," according to Business Insider.

From then on, Javice began crafting a polished image for herself. She often posed for photos with celebrities, business leaders, and social activists, posting them on social media to reinforce her persona as a young, successful entrepreneur.

A former classmate once remarked that she looked capable and driven but was a little too showy.

Javice frequently boasted that she had won a spot in a program that awards $100,000 but turned it down. However, the organization behind the program publicly refuted her claim, stating that she had never been selected.

PoverUp’s progress also did not match Javice’s claims. In reality, the company’s business performance was poor, and it never issued a single loan to entrepreneurs in developing countries as promised. A lawyer familiar with the business commented that it "was a very grandiose idea, and it didn't really get that far off the ground."

After graduating from Wharton, Javice abandoned the startup and quickly moved on to launch a job-search platform designed to help new graduates and employers connect more effectively, which also failed. After losing hundreds of thousands of dollars, she let go of her entire team.

Not long after, Javice rebranded the company under a new name, Frank, and made her comeback.

‘Fake it ‘til you make it’

Despite two failures, Javice continued to maintain the image of a young, resilient entrepreneur who thrived in the face of adversity. That persona earned her praise and frequent appearances in major media outlets.

The name "Frank" represented honesty, as Javice explained in a 2017 interview, where she said: "We just wanted to stand for something that was honest, that was transparent."

The irony, however, was that the company was built on layers of deception. According to one person familiar with the young CEO, when Frank launched and had virtually no users, Javice lied to potential partners that thousands had already signed up. When staff questioned her about this, she promptly fired them.

"Her response was always: ‘Listen, these old people don't understand, this is how it works, you fake it 'til you make it,'" another person familiar with Javice told Forbes.

The U.S. Department of Education in 2017 accused Frank of misleading users into thinking the company was affiliated with the government, prompting it to revise its website to clarify that it was not an official government partner.

A few years later, a U.S. lawmaker voiced similar concerns, warning that Frank might be confusing students and profiting from their personal data. Experts in the field also said that although the company promised to help students complete financial aid forms in minutes, it often skipped questions that might be important for some students.

After JPMorgan Chase filed its lawsuit, it shut down all services on Frank’s website.

In 2023, Javice and Olivier Amar, Frank’s chief growth and acquisition officer, were accused of inflating the company’s customer numbers during negotiations to sell Frank to the bank for US$175 million. The former was released on a $2 million bond.

During a hearing in February at a federal court, prosecutors said Javice had paid $18,000 to a data science professor to fabricate a list of more than 4 million fake student records to secure the massive acquisition payout from JPMorgan Chase. In reality, Frank had fewer than 300,000 users.

Javice denied the allegations but was eventually convicted of securities fraud and several other charges in March.

Speaking tearfully in court before sentencing, Javice said she had "made choices that I will spend my entire life regretting," as quoted by Fortune.

She was sentenced in late September to more than seven years in prison. The judge also ordered her to forfeit over $22 million in salary, stock and bonuses she had earned illegally from the sale of Frank and from her tenure as a JPMorgan executive before the fraud was exposed.

Prosecutors, quoted by CNN, warned of "an alarming trend of founders and executives of small startup companies engaging in fraud, including making misrepresentations about their companies’ core products or services, in order to make their companies attractive targets for investors and/or buyers."

Javice and Olivier were jointly ordered to pay $287.5 million in restitution, which covers the company sale and over $100 million in legal fees.

But even if the order stands, JPMorgan is unlikely to recover more than a fraction of the total amount as Javice is required to pay only 10% of her income toward restitution after her release, and the order expires in 20 years, according to Bloomberg.

At the sentencing, the judge criticized the bank’s due diligence process, remarking that it had "a lot to blame themselves [for]" after failing to properly verify Frank’s customer data. Even so, he noted that his responsibility was "punishing her (Javice’s) conduct and not JPMorgan’s stupidity."

"Fraud remains a fraud," US District Court Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein noted, "whether you outsmart someone who is smart or someone who is a fool."