Jakarta –
Charlie Javice flashes his name despite his young age, but he is accused of committing major fraud. He launched the companyn startup who was named Frank in 2017 when he was 24 years old.
The startup aims to help students apply for college financial aid. In 2021, the much-lauded startup was sold to JPMorgan Chase for USD 175 million or around IDR 2.6 trillion.
Now, quoted by detikINET from CBS, JPMorgan claims Frank’s story helped more than 5 million students enter campus, mostly engineering. According to the lawsuit, Javice paid a data science professor $18,000 to create a list of 4 million fake student names to convince the financial giant.
The accusations are the latest cases leveled against a millennial company founder who was initially highly praised but then accused of defrauding. Other cases include Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, who recently went bankrupt, to the founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, who has been jailed.
Alex Spiro, Javice’s lawyer, denied the allegations. “They were given all the data in advance for the purchase of Frank and Charlie Javice highlighting the restrictions imposed by student privacy laws,” he said.
“When JPMorgan couldn’t get around those privacy laws after Frank’s purchase, they started twisting the facts and wrongly accused Charlie Javice of changing the deal,” he added.
JPMorgan said Javice is no longer with the company. They ask for compensation that has not been mentioned in the lawsuit.
Initially, JP Morgan asked Javice for proof he had more than 4 million subscribers. Javice initially refused, claiming he couldn’t share the name due to privacy concerns. But according to JP Morgan, Frank actually has less than 300,000 customer accounts.
“Ultimately, the data science professor created a list of 4.265 million fake customer accounts as requested by Javice,” JPMorgan claims in the lawsuit.
JPMorgan, unaware of the problem, completed the USD 175 million purchase, but then realized something was wrong. Now of course they want Javice to be responsible for this problem.
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