2013 Wharton graduate Charlie Javice was sentenced to just over seven years in federal prison on Monday for defrauding JPMorgan Chase in its $175 million purchase of her startup, Frank.
Her 85-month prison term will be followed by three years of supervised release. Following her conviction in March, federal prosecutors initially recommended that Javice serve 12 years in prison after she was found to have exaggerated the customer base of her financial aid assistance program.
“I am deeply sorry, and I am asking with all my heart for forgiveness,” Javice told senior United States district court judge Alvin Hellerstein during the trial, according to Bloomberg. “If it were within my power, I would never make the same mistake.”
During the five-week trial — which began in February and concluded on March 28 in New York — a 12-person jury found Javice guilty on all four of the counts she faced: bank fraud, securities fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy.
1984 Wharton graduate and Wharton Board of Advisors Chair Marc Rowan sent a letter of support on Sept. 11 to Hellerstein urging the court to “impose a lenient sentence” for Javice.
Rowan — who served as Frank’s lead investor, according to Javice in 2018 — described the letter as an opportunity to “offer a more complete picture of who Charlie is as a person.”
He also emphasized Javice’s “resilience, intelligence and dedication to helping people in need,” adding that she has remained a “positive and upbeat person through these challenging past years.”
The trial investigated allegations against Javice and Frank’s Chief Growth Officer Olivier Amar for falsifying records to inflate Frank’s customer base tenfold in order to secure the company’s acquisition.
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JPMorgan filed a lawsuit against Javice in December 2022 — one month after firing her. The bank accused Javice of fabricating more than four million user accounts despite maintaining less than 300,000, according to the lawsuit.
In 2018, Frank settled with the federal government over allegations that the startup misrepresented its connection to the Department of Education.
Two years later, members of Congress wrote a bipartisan letter to the Federal Trade Commission claiming that Frank was misleading students by promoting a nonexistent universal application for COVID-19 pandemic-era student relief funds.
Javice countersued JPMorgan in 2023, claiming that four million users did go on Frank’s website to read articles about financial aid processes. She did not dispute that less than half a million users used the platform to complete financial aid forms.
