Charlie Javice, Frank, and JPMorgan's $175 Million Lesson
Editor's Note: Forbes' Fallen Stars
Welcome to the debut of our new series: 30 Under 30: Where Are They Now? (Indictment Edition) — where we examine the spectacular flameouts who once graced those prestigious lists celebrating youth, ambition, and apparently, in some cases, a cavalier relationship with reality.
For every legitimate wunderkind who disrupts an industry, there's a charlatan whose only real innovation is finding new ways to separate investors from their money. Today, we're examining Charlie Javice, who went from Forbes laurel-wearer to JPMorgan's $175 million mistake faster than you can say "synthetic data manipulation."
The $175 Million Cautionary Tale: Charlie Javice, Frank, and JPMorgan's Very Expensive Lesson
Remember when your college roommate exaggerated her summer internship into sounding like she personally advised Warren Buffett? Well, that's Charlie Javice on an institutional scale — which netted her an exit from her company Frank for $175 million from JPMorgan Chase.
In what can only be described as the corporate equivalent of purchasing a counterfeit Bitcoin wallet and being shocked—shocked!—when the coins disappear, Jamie Dimon's JPMorgan is now dealing with the aftermath of acquiring Frank, a student financial aid platform that claimed to help "over 5 million students" navigate the byzantine world of college financing.
Plot twist: those 5 million students? Allegedly conjured up to impress bankers, not serve borrowers.
From Soup Kitchens to Synthetic Data
Charlie Javice's journey reads like a Silicon Valley bildungsroman written by someone who skimmed "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and "White Collar Crime for Dummies."
Born to a hedge fund father and spending her childhood shuttling between affluent New York suburbs, albeit in rented homes, a young equestrian Charlie developed what her marketing would later frame as a deep commitment to solving economic inequality. This commitment first manifested in PoverUp—a microfinance platform that one involved lawyer described as "a very grandiose idea" that "didn't really get that far off the ground." Translation: Empathy makes a great pitch deck—but a terrible business model.
PoverUp: No Minimum Viable Product
Before Frank became her ticket to infamy, Javice's PoverUp venture deserves closer examination.
Reportedly inspired by everything from a soup kitchen to a 5-year-old's birthday party to a summer stint abroad, she and her brother Elie created PoverUp. This online network lets "socially minded students learn, connect and invest in microfinance and social businesses," which struck most as too vague to be a strategy. Her two co-founders? Barely mentioned, almost like they were written out of the script.
Notably, PoverUp doesn't appear in IRS tax-exempt lookup databases, indicating it may not have formally attained 501(c)(3) status under that name, implying it was always considered a for-profit venture.
PoverUp had ambitious goals to expand to 500 campuses, invest $10 million, and partner with 10 microfinance organizations and social businesses by 2016.
In interviews, Javice claimed PoverUp had partnerships with over 75 universities and a "gold-plated" board of advisors. However, one of the supposed partners has no record of their involvement.
Even Michael Gibson from the Thiel Fellowship disputed Javice's claim of being offered a fellowship, stating she was "never offered a fellowship" and that they "didn't trust she could succeed in a real way. We emphatically rejected her."
Ouch. When the people whose literal job is to bet on ambitious young entrepreneurs don't believe in you, it might be time for some introspection—or, if you're Javice, time to double down on "dropping names" and "pretending to know more inside baseball about the tech industry."
The Pivot, Frank-en sense…
After graduating from Wharton (where she was allegedly on financial aid despite her father's 35+ years on Wall Street), Javice launched several ventures before settling on Frank in 2017. Named to imply transparency and "honesty," Frank promised to simplify the FAFSA process—a claim that financial aid experts quickly questioned for its factual accuracy.
Frank initially operated under the domain "frankfafsa.com"—a not-so-subtle nod to the federal FAFSA program. Javice even appeared on CNBC using the handle @FrankFAFSA. Unsurprisingly, the government didn’t love the brand borrowing their trademark. A 2018 settlement forced Frank to surrender the domain and stop using language that implied official affiliation. The rebrand? Barely a speed bump.
Javice maintained what one might generously call “aggressive optimism” about Frank’s user numbers. When colleagues raised concerns during pitch prep, her reported response was straight from the startup handbook: “These old people don’t get it. This is how it works—you fake it ’til you make it.”
And for a while, it seemed to work. Frank pulled in $20.5 million across three funding rounds, and Javice built a reputation as a sharp, ambitious founder with typical Silicon Valley vibes.
Internally, though, staff said she was more focused on playing the role of a tech CEO than actually building like one.
(Oh, honey. Elizabeth Holmes called—she wants her business strategy back.)
"We're pre-revenue."
In 2019, Javice hit the entrepreneurial jackpot by landing on both Forbes' "30 Under 30" in finance and Crain's New York Business' "40 Under 40" lists. These prestigious recognitions—essentially the millennial equivalent of receiving Michelin stars—lent crucial credibility to Frank's mission of helping lower-income borrowers, online education users, and women drowning in student loan debt.
One can imagine the Forbes selection committee: "She went to Wharton, was on CNBC, and has a killer LinkedIn headshot. What could go wrong?"
The Crain's profile highlighted Javice's "determination," with Aleph investor Michael Eisenberg gushing about her persistence. And determined she certainly was—though perhaps not in the way her champions imagined. The "determination" to maintain a façade of success outweighed the determination actually to build a sustainable business with real users. These accolades—meant to celebrate actual achievement—instead became accessories to alleged fraud, lending a veneer of legitimacy that helped convince JPMorgan that Frank was worth acquiring.
Just Plain Fakin’ It: When the FTC Has to Step In
The need to look like a full-service platform—and Javice's flair for fictional features—touched every part of Frank's operations. In 2020, as students were reeling from pandemic disruptions, Frank began aggressively marketing its ability to help students access COVID relief funds.
This entrepreneurial angle caught the attention of bipartisan members of Congress, who called on the FTC to investigate Frank for misleading students about accessing coronavirus relief funds. The FTC responded with a warning letter.
Let's pause to appreciate this moment: When politicians from both sides of the aisle agree you might be acting shady, you've achieved a rare bipartisan consensus that most policy experts can only dream of.
Not content with potentially misleading students about financial aid and COVID relief, Frank also dabbled in educational offerings. In early 2021, Frank's website listed 448 courses supposedly available from Keiser University. Minor detail: Keiser University had "no relationship with Frank and never contracted with the company for services." Ditto for the 317 classes advertised from Lee University, which had no connection to the site either.
Despite these nonexistent courses, Frank's investor presentation claimed the pipeline of schools wanting to do business with them was "exploding"—though strangely, the company was "precluded" from naming any actual partners. References were available upon request.
"We're building the future."
By 2021, Frank was suddenly claiming 4.25 million users—an astonishing feat considering that, as TuitionFit co-founder Mark Salisbury noted using simple math, only about "two million students start college each year for the first time." Salisbury found it inexplicable that Frank could amass such a following in such a crowded market.
When JPMorgan came knocking with acquisition interest, hungry to reach a new customer market in the college students on the site, Javice allegedly panicked at their request for user data. According to testimony, she asked Frank's head engineer, Patrick Vovor, to create "synthetic" data for 4 million non-existent users from the site’s less than 300,000 users. When he refused (apparently concerned about "orange jumpsuits"), Javice allegedly found a more accommodating data science professor to do the job.
The professor, Adam Kapelner, has testified that he created simulated data using Frank's actual customer information as "the seed," carefully maintaining the same proportion of first names. Yep—she allegedly paid someone with a PhD to ensure her fake data had statistically accurate distributions of people named "Michael."
Meanwhile, JPMorgan might have failed to see some large holes in its month-long due diligence. However, there were a few questions. The Wall Street Journal reported Sindhu Subramaniam, from JPMorgan's corporate development team, questioned "how do we verify her claims of access to 5M[illion] households," because "absent tangible revenues—how will we even know."
An executive even forwarded a Jamie Dimon quote about "sometimes skipping analysis"—which, in hindsight, reads more like an accidental mission statement.
In September 2021, JPMorgan Chase & Co. completed its acquisition of Frank for $175 million. Charlie Javice became a managing director at JPMorgan and head of student solutions. Olivier Amar, Chief Growth Officer at Frank, also joined JPMorgan. Javice and Amar split $26 million from the sale, and Javice was promised an additional $20 million retention bonus.
"Fail fast, fail forward."
In late 2021, the façade crumbled spectacularly when JPMorgan attempted to farm Frank's vaunted customer list. Of 400,000 marketing emails sent, only 28% were deliverable (compared to their usual 99% rate), and just 103 people clicked through—numbers that are on par with spamming random people.
Jamie Dimon referred to the purchase as a "huge mistake" on a quarterly earnings call. JPMorgan shut down Frank's website and removed the acquisition press release.
Soon, Javice was placed on administrative leave for misusing her corporate credit card. After the dismal results, JPMorgan launched an investigation that uncovered the alleged fraud, leading to Javice and Amar firing in late 2022 . They would both be arrested for charged with wire fraud, bank fraud, securities fraud and conspiracy.
Press reports have made hay with the messages later revealed in which Javice commented on Elizabeth Holmes' conviction. Javice expressed sympathy, seeing it as a miscarriage of justice and suggesting that Holmes' "sophisticated" investors were at fault. Be cautious about who you praise in Slack or WhatsApp, since it can always be subpoenaed and leaked.
As this saga unfolds in a Manhattan courtroom, it’s hard not to appreciate the symmetry: a company called “Frank” that was anything but honest, led by someone who mistook faking it for a business plan.
Lessons for the Ambitious (and Law-Abiding)
For those of us building careers and companies the legitimate way, there are some takeaways:
A glossy feature doesn't make you legitimate. But being legitimate might one day earn you a glossy feature. Forbes and Crain's are fantastic validators, but they're not the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Due diligence isn't just a fancy term for paperwork. When your potential acquisition's user numbers exceed the entire market of first-year college students, ask a follow-up question or two.
"Fake it 'til you make it" has limits. There's a difference between confidence and fabrication. One gets you through impostor syndrome; the other gets you through the doors of a federal courthouse.
Your competitors aren't just watching—they're counting. When Mark Salisbury of TuitionFit pointed out that Frank's claimed user numbers exceeded the annual intake of first-year college students, he wasn't just being catty but doing fundamental market analysis. Remember that in your industry, someone is always doing the math on your claims.
The Last Word
While Javice's trial continues, and JPMorgan tries to salvage its reputation, we're left pondering the most expensive lesson in fintech history. Jamie Dimon may have called the acquisition a "huge mistake," but at least he's in good company—just ask the Winklevoss twins about Bitcoin or anyone who bought at the top of the housing market in 2007.
As for Charlie Javice, her days of helping students with financial planning may be over, but she's undoubtedly giving law students plenty of future case study material.
And remember, friends—if your business plan involves WhatsApp rants about how unfair it is to get charged with fraud, it may be time to rethink that five-year plan. Because while millions of students struggled with rising debt and broken systems, one woman dared to ask: "But what about my brand?"
Next issue in our "30 Under 30: Where Are They Now? (Indictment Edition)" series: "The Crypto Bro Who Went From Digital Wallet To Ankle Bracelet"