- After being on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, Charlie Javice is approaching the trial for a 175 million -dollar JPMGAN Chase fraud.
- Federations say she cheated the world’s largest bank to buy her financial aid startup startup Frank.
- On Thursday, she lost her attempt to be tried separately by a former colleague planning to attack it.
After being on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, former Charlie Javice entrepreneur is awaiting trial next month on charges that she cheated JPMORGAN Chase to pay $ 175 million for her college financial assistance, Frank.
The jury may be on a wild trip.
Former Number 2 of Javice in Frank, defendant Olivier Amar, aims to base his defense on the attack on it, was discovered in a preliminary hearing at the Federal Court in Manhattan on Thursday.
“We only learned this on January 8, that the defense would be an antagonist,” Javice Ronald Sullivan judges told Javice, demanding that she and Amar be tried separately.
“The defense will be Miss Javice’s derogation,” the lawyer said.
US District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein quickly denied the request for special trials. Javice and Amar are charged with “a common plan or scheme,” the judge explained.
“This trial is a complicated trial. It will take weeks from the time of the court and the jury and it would be simply unnecessary to have two trials when there could be one,” the judge said.
“This is merely an antagonistic defense – of course nothing that would lead to something that is unfair to each of the defendants.”
A young entrepreneur and the largest bank in the world
According to the indictment against them, Javice and Amar, together cheated the country’s largest bank to pay a small fortune to Frank, a lucrative technology company she launched at the age of 24 containing software to help students apply for help financial in college.
Javice began withdrawing JPMORGAN CHASE in the summer of 2021. Then, 28, Javice was something like a boyfriend, giving interviews for the main news publications and making not only forbes list but also the Crain’s New List York for 40 under 40 years of age.
“Don’t wait time to get up in the traditional sense” during a negotiation, Javice told Business Insider in July 2021. It was the same month that prosecutors say she gave JPMORGAN Chase with two presentations in Power Point claiming Frank There were more than 4 million users.
“If you see an opportunity, don’t be afraid to jump,” she told BI afterwards.
It was these claims of a mass base of users who drew Jpmorgan Chase. The bank bought Frank, in a large part, to gain access to these users, hoping that these future college students will become new customers for Chase products, federals say prosecutors in court documents.
When the bank sought to verify the database of Frank users before engaging in the purchase, Javice and Amar called their software engineering director. They asked the engineer to create synthetic data that would make it look like they had millions of users, prosecutors claim.
“Yes, it is legal,” allegedly told Amar the engineer in a message quoted by prosecutors. “We don’t want to end up with orange jumps.”
Their engineer left. So the pair paid $ 18,000 to an external data scientist who generated what prosecutors say there were 4 million lines of completely fabricated names, emails, home addresses and phone numbers.
“The defendants created a fake database,” US Assistant Prosecutor Micah Festa Fergenson said at Amar’s trial in July. “It was essentially a giant Excel Spreadsheet that had over 4 million lines and a lot of supposed data. But it was all fake.”
The sale took place in September 2021, with JPMORGAN Chase held Javice and Amar as no. 1 and no. 2 of Frank. As a new head of JPMORGAN Chase student solutions, Javice was paid an annual salary of $ 300,000 and pocket $ 21 million in stock plus a $ 20 million retention bonus, prosecutors claim.
Knowing that the bank will soon try to use data to set savings accounts, credit cards and the like, the pair then bought for $ 100,000 in the open market, data for more than four million college students , prosecutors claim.
“When Chase eventually went and asked them,” well, send the student data list, “they sent this list of students who had bought in the open market,” Fergenson claimed on Amar.
Just one year after the sale, JPMORGAN Chase realized that Frank had no more than 300,000 legitimate contacts of users – and that the remainder of the 4 million contacts were essentially invalid.
“Chase made a testing test of a marketing campaign,” the prosecutor said at Amar’s trial. “Many of the emails were old and didn’t work. Almost no one clicked. And it was completely unexpected.”
The bank closed Frank, firing from work and suing Javice. She was arrested in April 2023, he was arrested three months later. Both have pleaded not guilty to the plot charges to carry out securities, wires and bank fraud.
Javice is free with a condition of $ 2 million, which was provided by her home in Miami Beach. Amar has been released on condition of $ 1 million.
Javice’s lawyers have argued that the materials sent to Jpmorgan Chase during the 2021 sales negotiations were legally taken and did not constitute fraud – and that the government issue is simply based on the bank’s lawsuit in December 2022.
Amar’s lawyers have said he was distant from the sale himself and that he did not consciously participate in any scheme.
Charlie Javice arrives at Federal Court. John Minchillo/AP
A last minute test storage
On Thursday, the start date for the selection of the jury – the second Monday of February – was postponed a week on February 18th. The judge moved the date to give the defendants more time to process an emergency rehearsal of the last minute by the government.
Describing SNAFU in front of the judges, prosecutors said that 14 months ago, in October 2023, they received two large data memory in response to a Google call: All the Google Drive documents and all documents of Google Drive Amar.
Prosecutors immediately shared Javice’s car documents with its defensive team and all Amar’s car documents – 13,000 documents – as required by federal rehearsal rules. But they neglected to give Javice Amari’s documents and vice versa.
“How would you like to receive 13,000 documents two weeks before the trial?” the judge asked in anger. “How did this happen?”
Javice, meanwhile, remains in the dark what the Amar’s “derogation” defense will include after the case goes to court, its lawyers complained on Thursday.
Will it be simply “finger indicator?” Asked Sullivan in court.
Or will Miss Javice be followed not only by the government but also by Mr. Amar? he asked. “At least we know what the government means. We have no idea what Mr. Amar means.”