JPMorgan acquired fintech Frank in 2021 for $175 million|Daniel Grass|CC BY-SA 4.0
Charlie Javice, 30, CEO of student loan planning platform Frank faces a lawsuit from JPMorgan Chase for allegedly creating around 4 million fake customers to entice the bank into acquiring it.
JPMorgan acquired Frank in 2021 for $175 million. The nation’s biggest bank was interested in the company’s user base—young students that could become potential customers.
Javice saw an opportunity and stated her fintech platform has 4.265 million student users when in reality it had less than 300,000.
To make it real, Javice and Frank’s chief growth officer Olivier Amar allegedly paid, “a data science professor at a New York City area college,” to create the fake users, claims the JPMorgan lawsuit.
On finding out that nearly 70% of Frank’s users aren’t real, JPMorgan shut down Frank’s website on Thursday.