Frank founder Charlie Javice is in talks with federal prosecutors after the entrepreneur was accused of using fake customer data to trick JPMorgan Chase into buying her firm for a $175 million, according to court records.
Javice, 31, faces criminal charges — for conspiracy, wire fraud, bank fraud and securities fraud — stemming from the September 2021 deal for her college financial-planning site.
She has not entered a plea in the case after being charged in federal court in Manhattan last month, according to prosecutors.
Javice, who was named on Forbes’s 2019 “30 under 30” list in finance, has had “discussions regarding a possible disposition of this case,” Assistant US Attorney Dina McLeod said in a filing disclosed publicly on Thursday.
The filing also revealed prosecutors were seeking an extension of the May 3 deadline to bring an indictment against Javice. The judge granted the extension until June 2, records show.
Javice’s lawyer Alex Spiro denied she is engaged in plea talks and that “disposition means dismissal,” according to Bloomberg.
The Post reached out to Spiro — whose clients have included Elon Musk, Alec Baldwin, and Charles Oakley — for comment.
Prosecutors allege Javice “lied directly to JPMC and fabricated data to support those lies — all in order to make over $45 million from the sale of her company.”
She faces more than 100 years in jail if convicted.
The banking giant filed a separate lawsuit last December that accused Javice of letting JPMorgan believe that Frank “was a business deeply engaged with the college-aged market segment with 4.265 million customers.”
JPMorgan instead “received a business with fewer than 300,000 customers,” according to the explosive suit filed in federal court in Delaware on Dec. 22.
According to the Department of Justice criminal complaint, Javice and Olivier Amar, the chief growth and acquisition officer at Frank, allegedly hired a data scientist for $18,000 to fabricate a list of fake names and addresses that were passed off as customers.
That data scientist then used computer-generated data to create a fake user base that included information such as customers’ names, birthdates, and colleges they attended, the lawsuit alleges.
Amar has not been charged in the criminal case and sued JPMorgan earlier this year demanding the bank cover his legal fees.
JPMorgan had called Frank the “leading college financial planning platform for students” in a statement at the time of the acquisition.
Javice and Amar allegedly walked away with $26 million as a result of JPMorgan’s acquisition of Frank, which billed itself as a site that makes it easier for aspiring college students to fill out financial aid forms.
JPMorgan later said that the Frank execs would not have received those millions “but for their misconduct.”
“Rather than reveal the truth, Javice first pushed back on [JPMorgan’s] request, arguing that she could not share her customer list due to privacy concerns,” the bank said in its legal filing. “After [JPMorgan] insisted, Javice chose to invent several million Frank customer accounts out of whole cloth.”
Javice had countersued JPMorgan, claiming it owed her millions in legal expenses as a result of an internal investigation from last spring.
She had been hired by JPMorgan as a managing director of Frank as part of the 2021 acquisition before being fired last November.
Javice went on to claim that the investment bank also owed her a $20 million bonus payment, and alleged that she was fired so JPMorgan could skirt it.
Spiro has said that JPMorgan’s lawsuit was “nothing but a cover.”
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