Six months after being found guilty of defrauding JPMorgan Chase & Co., startup founder Charlie Javice has been sentenced to a little over seven years in prison.
U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein delivered the sentence on Monday in Manhattan federal court, adding that the 85-month prison time would be followed by three years of supervised release. Prosecutors had asked for a harsher 12-year prison sentence.
Javice, 32, will also have to pay restitution and forfeiture. Prosecutors asked the court to require Javice to forfeit about $20 million currently held in her frozen accounts, per The Wall Street Journal. Hellerstein ultimately required Javice to forfeit $22.4 million, per Bloomberg.
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On Monday, Javice expressed “profound remorse” for her actions, saying that she had “made mistakes.”
“I am deeply sorry, and I am asking with all my heart for forgiveness,” Javice said, per WSJ.
Javice made headlines in 2021 when JPMorgan acquired her college financial aid startup, Frank, for $175 million. Frank was a site that helped students apply for federal financial aid and locate scholarships. At the time, Javice claimed that the online portal had reached more than five million students at 6,000 schools since its launch in 2017.
However, JPMorgan quickly discovered that most of Frank’s customers were fake when it launched an email campaign targeting the students listed as users. The bank was unable to send messages to more than 70% of the email addresses Javice provided, and discovered that Frank had fewer than 300,000 actual customers.
Most of Frank’s client base was fabricated by Javice with the assistance of a data science professor, who was paid $18,000 to participate in the deception, per WSJ.
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According to Business Insider, Hellerstein said that Javice was “a good person,” but that “others need to be deterred” from following her path.
“I don’t think you will be committing any crimes,” Hellerstein told Javice.
Who Is Charlie Javice?
Javice is a 32-year-old entrepreneur who created the student financial aid platform Frank in 2017. The purpose of the website was to help students fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and apply for scholarships.