Charlie Javice sold a student financial aid startup to JPMorgan Chase for $175 million. A jury later found that much of what the bank bought did not exist. In September 2025 she was sentenced to 85 months in federal prison.
Early years
Javice was born in 1992 or 1993 and grew up in Westchester County, New York. Her father, a French financier, worked at a hedge fund, and her mother is a life coach and former teacher. She went to the French-American School of New York and graduated from the Wharton School in 2013 with a bachelor’s degree in finance and legal studies, after three years. As a freshman she founded PoverUp, an online platform that helped students start micro-finance clubs. In her sophomore year she joined the Board of Overseers of the University of Pennsylvania Hillel, and she stayed until 2015.
Frank
She launched Frank in 2016 to help student borrowers find loans and financial aid. Trouble started early. In 2017 the Department of Education accused the company of possibly leading customers to think it was affiliated with the government, and Frank had to move its site from frankfafsa.com to frank.com. It settled with the department in 2018. That same year Adi Omesy, a Frank co-founder, sued Javice over wage theft in Israel, and in 2021 she was ordered to pay $35,000.
Recognition kept coming regardless. Forbes put her on its 30 Under 30 finance list in 2019, a choice it came to regret: four years later she appeared in a “Hall of Shame” of ten picks the magazine wished it could take back.
The JPMorgan deal
In September 2021 JPMorgan bought Frank for $175 million and made Javice a managing director overseeing student products at Chase. A year later the relationship collapsed. After the bank sued, she was suspended in September 2022 and fired for cause that November. Its complaint said the data Frank reported was largely fabricated, and that she paid a data science professor $18,000 for a list of more than four million fake student names to persuade the bank to buy. Javice countersued, saying she was being made a scapegoat for JPMorgan’s own weak due diligence.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged her on April 4, 2023 with wire fraud affecting a financial institution, securities fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy, and the Securities and Exchange Commission brought its own fraud charges the same day. She was released on a $2 million bond, surrendered her passports, was limited to New York City and southern Florida, and agreed to stay away from witnesses. A four-count indictment against her became public on May 18, 2023.
Trial and sentence
Javice pleaded not guilty. The legal bills piled up in a separate fight: after she sued in Delaware Chancery Court, a judge ruled that the terms of the deal, which made her a bank employee, obliged JPMorgan to pay her defense costs. They eventually passed $100 million.
Her trial opened in February 2025. On March 28 a jury convicted her and co-defendant Olivier Amar, Frank’s chief growth and acquisition officer, on all four counts, each punishable by up to 30 years. Testimony from Adam Kapelner, a Queens College mathematics professor, was striking. He said she told him she was in an “urgent pinch” and asked him to use “synthetic data” to build a list of over four million customers from a list of fewer than 300,000.
Before sentencing she worked as a Pilates instructor in South Florida, and her lawyers argued an ankle monitor would hamper her teaching. Judge Alvin Hellerstein rejected that, citing flight risk. In late September 2025 he sentenced her to 85 months, ordered her to forfeit more than $22 million in pay, stock and bonuses, and had her and Amar jointly pay $287.5 million in restitution, covering the sale price and the legal fees JPMorgan had covered.
On March 24, 2026 a federal judge rejected her appeal, which argued that two law clerks’ ties to JPMorgan’s outside law firm created conflicts of interest. In June she reportedly sought a pardon from President Donald Trump as part of a wave of clemency tied to America 250. Javice is a dual citizen of the United States and France and has lived in Miami.
Sources
- Charlie Javice – Wikipedia
- Amazon.com: The Rise and Fall of Charlie Javice: From Forbes 30 Under 30 to Federal Conviction: In-Depth Analysis of a Fintech Founder’s Rise, Fall, and the $175 Million Fraud That Exposed Silicon Valley’s Dar: 9798316055227: Cooper, Steven G.: Books
