JPMorgan Chumps
A young fraudster duped the nation's largest bank out of $175 million. Now she doesn't want to wear her ankle bracelet
“Who is going to believe a con artist? Everyone, if she is good.” - Andy Griffith
Poor Charlie Javice. Why should she have to wear an ankle bracelet? She’s a pilates instructor.
Perhaps Javice, 32, deserves some consideration after making fools of the proud dealmakers at the nation’s largest bank. In 2021, she essentially sold JPMorgan Chase a fake email list for $175 million.
It has to rank as one of the dumbest deals in banking history.
Javice was convicted Friday for fraud and faces decades in prison when she is sentenced on July 26. Meantime, she’s out on a $2 million bond and needs to teach pilates.
“She cannot do it with the ankle bracelet on,” her attorney Ron Sullivan told the judge on Friday.
At least Javice is headed to the right place. Joseph Pilates invented her favorite exercise while incarcerated in a prison camp. A judge will rule Tuesday on her flippant ankle-bracelet request.
This is the kind of petulance that the geniuses at JPMorgan Chase should have noticed before they grossly overpaid Javice in 2021 for Frank, a website that helped students to fill out federal student aid applications.
Javice was a 24-year-old Wharton grad in 2016 when she founded Frank.
JPMorgan Chase executives loved her so much that in addition to paying $175 million for her company, they made her a managing director and planned to pay her as much as $20 million more to continue running Frank.
They thought they were getting a college financial planning website with five million users, but they soon learned that their pilates teacher was stretching.
Evidence showed Javice paid for a fake list of four million emails. In reality, Frank had only about 300,000 customers.
Javice now draws comparisons to Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes for the audacity of her lies and for fooling sophisticated investors who should have known better.
“It was a huge mistake,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon conceded on the bank’s fourth quarter 2022 conference call.
In January 2023, the bank shut down the site.
It’s difficult to imagine how anyone could pay this much for a website without checking if its email list was real. This is a bank with $4.2 trillion in assets, not some dupe in an Internet romance scam.
If anyone needs ankle bracelets, it’s the JPMorgan Chase executives who were easily suckered into this deal by a 20-something fraudster. Shouldn’t somebody be monitoring them?
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