Charlie Javice Found Guilty of Defrauding JPMorgan Chase of $175 Million

JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon has called the acquisition of Javice’s college financial aid startup a ‘huge mistake.’

Charlie Javice leaves Federal Court in New York on Aug. 23, 2023. John Minchillo/AP Photo

Charlie Javice, the founder of student loan application startup Frank, was found guilty of defrauding JPMorgan Chase by vastly inflating the number of customers before selling the company to the bank for $175 million.

After a five-week trial, a federal jury in New York returned a guilty verdict on Friday, convicting Javice and her top executive, Olivier Amar, on all charges. Javice, who pleaded not guilty, did not testify during the trial.

The verdict includes three counts of fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit fraud, each carrying a potential prison sentence of up to 30 years.

“While Javice and Amar may have thought that they could lie and cheat their way to a huge payday, their lies caught up with them, and they now stand convicted by a jury of their peers,” acting U.S. Attorney Matthew Podolsky of the Southern District of New York said in a statement.

Javice founded Frank in 2017 after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, inspired by her own frustrations navigating the financial aid process. Marketed as a “TurboTax for FAFSA,” the platform promised to simplify—at least at that time—the lengthy and confusing Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) process, charging users a modest fee for its services.

JPMorgan Chase bought the startup in the summer of 2021, a few weeks after Javice first met with the bank’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon. In a presentation to the banks’ executives, Javice painted an attractive picture of the startup’s future: millions of users who, upon graduating from college, could transition into loyal customers for JPMorgan’s credit cards, loans, and other financial products.

The deal quickly soured after JPMorgan discovered that Frank had fewer than 300,000 actual users, far below the 4.25 million Javice had claimed. The bank sued her in December 2022, and federal agents arrested her the following April at Newark Airport in New Jersey.

Dimon, one of the world’s most powerful bankers, later described the acquisition of the student finance platform as a “huge mistake.”

“I'll tell you the lessons learned here when this thing is out of litigation,” Dimon said on a quarterly earnings call in January 2023. “Obviously, this thing, in one way or another, was a huge mistake.”

According to the complaint, while negotiating the sale to JPMorgan, Javice worked to fabricate a dataset that made it seem like Frank had millions of users. At first, she tried to enlist her company’s head of engineering to fake the data, but he “felt uncomfortable” and refused. She then paid a data scientist $18,000 to generate a list of over 4 million fake Frank users.

Javice’s attorneys are expected to appeal the verdict. They have tried to make the case that her trial has been improper because Amar was trying to save himself by arguing to jurors that she hid information and misled him.

The case draws comparisons to that of Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos, whose blood-testing startup falsely claimed to revolutionize health care. Holmes is currently serving an 11-year prison sentence for defrauding investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Meanwhile, one of the main selling points of Frank—simplifying the painful FAFSA process—has become less relevant.

In 2020, near the end of his first term, President Donald Trump signed legislation mandating a major overhaul of the FAFSA system. The redesigned online application dramatically slashed the number of required questions from 108 to around 50, while also allowing families to import their tax information directly from the IRS database.

Despite a glitch-ridden initial rollout, the revamped FAFSA has seen a surge in usage. Last week, the Education Department announced that more than 8 million FAFSA forms for the 2025–26 school year have been successfully submitted and processed—a nearly 50 percent increase compared to the same period last year.