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PatriceONoel e/acc We went to a musical called "Oh Africa, Brave Africa". It was a laugh riot.  1yr ago (businessinsider.com) Edited 1yr ago 2,524 thread views #160531

Forbes 30-under-30 :marseyfrozenchosen: girlboss arrested for selling company to JPMorgan for $175m pretending they had 4 million users when they only had 250k

https://www.businessinsider.com/charlie-javice-frank-fintech-startup-jp-morgan-fraud-2023-1

https://i.rdrama.net/images/16806299802045014.webp

No one noticed?

:#marseywrongthonk:

Highlights

  • "All Frank was doing was making it simpler to fill out standard federal financial aid paperwork" but she pretended it provided $28k in student loans 2x the national average

  • she filled their user database with 4 million fake emails/names

  • it took JPMorgan a year to noootice

  • "Despite a public record that raised questions about Javice and Frank — including warnings from the Department of Education and Federal Trade Commission, and a wage theft lawsuit from Frank's cofounder — news outlets and investors kept buying into the narrative that Javice spun."

  • arrested & facing up to 30yrs in prison

  • "Over and over, Javice earned plaudits in the media for projects whose impact she overstated. Glowing profiles missed inaccuracies that could have been caught with a basic fact-check, focusing instead on her youth and status as one of a small number of women startup founders. One journ*list even introduced Javice, then 19, to a key Frank investor."

Her background

https://i.rdrama.net/images/16806299809553056.webp

^ Her with her brother @ 19

  • ambitious af: originally made a microfinance startup called PoverUp (yuck) in high school with her brother

  • told the media she raised $300k for the startup, but there's no proof

  • CNBC ran a bit about Peter Thiel's "paid to not go to college" grant, she appeared on the show claiming she turned the offer down, Peter Thiel emailed CNBC saying she was not even selected

  • still got her tons of press

  • "Fast Company's 2011 list of 100 Most Creative People and a complimentary writeup in Forbes. PoverUp was ranked as one of the "11 coolest college startups" by Inc. Magazine, while Wharton called Javice "the voice of a microfinance generation" in a video it has since removed from YouTube."

Startup number two

https://i.rdrama.net/images/1680629981284241.webp

  • since PoverUp wasn't a real company and naturally died, she created another company with an :marseymerchant: Isreali called "tapd: a company that connected young workers with job opportunities via text message"

  • completely bombed, lost a few hundred k and ended up in a lawsuit w/ Isreali :marseysaluteisrael: courts

  • she pivoted Tapd to an entirely new market that (surprise) turned out to be heavily regulated and she didn't do the research. Sold it as a "learning moment"

  • despite this :marseymerchant: Isreali dude joined her at Frank, before she jewed him out of 10% equity and failed to pay him salary, so he sued her

That doesn't stop a girlboss though:

While the story of Tapd seemed to be one of failure and contentious mismanagement, Javice would spin that turmoil into a story of triumph. The young founder made the crisis part of her personal success story, omitting the lawsuit and framing the layoffs as a teaching moment

Media sucking her (girl) peepee

In 2018 NYTimes let her do an Op-ed:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/opinion/fafsa-college-financial-aid.html

https://i.rdrama.net/images/1680629981526812.webp

and was forced to follow it up with a long correction because apparently she didnt know shit about student aid

She got lots of local news:

The death blow:

Frank's public statements about its user base were all over the map.

In April 2017, Frank's website said "thousands" of families using its service had received "$75 million in free aid." (That same website had stock images of people, including of "smiling mature woman" and "good looking cheerful manager," labeled as actual users.)

In November 2018, Frank's website said it had helped 300,000 families unlock over $7 billion in aid.

Frank stuck with the "over 300,000" figure for more than two years. But suddenly, in January 2021, the company began claiming that it served "over 4.25 million students," according to archived versions of its website and tweets from Frank's account referenced in JP Morgan's lawsuit.

In reality, Frank only ever had about 250,000 users, according to JPMorgan's legal complaint.

Orange site discusses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35441211

(PDF) The JPMorgan complaint: https://content.fortune.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Complaint-1.pdf

211
New Old Top Bottom Controversial Random
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Some article I glanced over (might even be the one you linked but I ain't reading any more :marseysmugretard:) said that she wouldn't share any specific information about the users due to privacy concerns and that's how she got JPM to buy it without ever knowing it was blatant fraud.

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Yep, from the lawsuit:

Rather than reveal the truth, Javice first pushed back on JPMC’s request, arguing that she could not share her customer list due to privacy concerns. After JPMC insisted, Javice chose to invent several million Frank customer accounts out of whole cloth.

Javice, along with her Chief Growth Officer Olivier Amar, first asked Frank’s Director of Engineering to create fake customer details using “synthetic data” techniques. In plain English, “synthetic data” is fake information typically created by computer algorithms. Not comfortable, the engineer asked Javice and Amar whether the request was legal. In response, Javice sought to assure the engineer that she was not requesting that the engineer engage in illegal conduct. The Frank engineer was not persuaded and declined to participate in the scheme, and instead said that he only would provide Javice with Frank’s actual list of customer accounts: fewer than 300,000 customer accounts as of July 31, 2021

Javice then turned to a data science professor at a New York City area college (the “Data Science Professor”) who advertised his “creative solutions” to data problems. Javice provided the Data Science Professor a list of 293,192 individuals who had started or submitted a FAFSA application through Frank. She then directed the Data Science Professor to use “synthetic data” techniques to create 4.265 million customer names, email addresses, birthdays, and other personal information based on the list Javice supplied

She paid this prof $13k to make the list seem accurate.

Then JPMC tried to use this list (because why else buy the fricking company?):

In January 2022, to test the quality of Frank’s customer list and the receptiveness of these customers to JPMC’s products and services, JPMC requested that Frank send Frank’s list of 4.265 million customers to a JPMC marketing team. Javice and Amar, however, knew that list did not exist.

Unsurprisingly, the results of the marketing test campaign were disastrous. Specifically, JPMC sent marketing test emails to what it believed were 400,000 unique Frank customers. Of the individuals contacted, only 28% of emails were delivered, compared to a 99% delivery rate JPMC usually sees with similar campaigns. Just 1.1% of the delivered emails were opened, compared to 30% for a typical JPMC campaign.

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lmao, this is why we need gdpr

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:#marseyprotestno:

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So is this a compulsive lying issue or what? How did she see this playing out? It's not like returning a vitamix box full of rocks to Amazon, at some point they were inevitably going to look closely at the software they bought.

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Between this and wework and FTX and juicero and theranos, I'm convinced all conspiracies are fake. The billionaire elites have no idea what they're doing, it's r-slurs all the way up.

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Juicero at least had a real working product. It was way overdesigned and underbuilt, but it at least did what it promised. The grift there was selling VC schmucks on the power of organic cold pressed juice as a service. In a way though it was weirdly prescient and with some retooling and a more realistic pricing scheme I think it might actually have legs now.

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Honestly feels like juicero and peloton are the same product. There's a timeline where every aspiring SVcel has a saas juicer next to their daylight alarm clock, and peloton flopped to a chorus of jeering "exercise bikes already exist" articles. It's not like those investors in particular were stupid, all investments ultimately come down to "yeah I have a good feeling about this one, throw 9 figures at it".

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Peloton's product is selling you the motivation to exercise. For customers who aren't intrinsically motivated, this requires a subscription service because you need to summon motivation from somewhere each time you exercise. I think it also has a bunch of "show off to your friends" features that allow it to be a status symbol in a way a juicer can't be.

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Motivation is fleeting and only works in the beginning, you need discipline. And discipline is very alien to 21st century Americans.

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daylight alarm clock

any day now Imma set mine up!

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Yeah if it had been half the cost and didn't have a subscription product that could be juiced by hand, it probably would still be around

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theranos

it was. literally. a real company. with a real product.

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:#marseyagreefast:

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>So is this a compulsive lying issue or what?

:#marseywomanmoment:

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Probably hoped to still be in charge after the buy out and eventually grow to that size with legit users, or that JPM would be too embarrassed to do anything about it.

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Grindmaxxers live on "fake it til you make it" where you lie until your company actually takes off, and then you scrub your lies away. She probably thought that they would eventually have a working product and eventually have 4 million users. She just needed more money first, and their tracks could be covered for long enough to get there.

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For the vast majority of fraudsters, the first person they fool is themselves. She probably genuinely didn't think she did anything wrong.

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