> Frank’s chief software engineer, Patrick Vovor, testified that Javice had asked him to generate synthetic data to support her claim that the company had more than 4 million users. When Vovor asked if that was legal, prosecutors said, Javice and Amar assured him that it was — and told him they didn’t want to end up in orange prison jumpsuits. Vovor testified that he refused to help. “I told them I would not do anything illegal,” Vovor told jurors.
> Seeking to dent Vovor’s credibility, defense lawyers suggested he was resentful that Javice didn’t want to date him.
That is one hell of a defense
This should be used as an example in engineering ethics classes for how important it is to say "no" to your employer when you are asked to do something that doesn't pass the smell test, no matter how trivial it may seem. This simple act saved the guy his career and (potentially) freedom.
You mean like sitting idle by your CEO, while he propagates FSD lies for years that can and will and did get people killed?
Sidebar: do these exist these days? I mean in software, specifically.
Yes, all accredited institutions are required to have one as part of their Computer Science curriculum.
Yeah, I think it's an ABET requirement for accreditation of engineering degrees.
Lots of people with an engineering title don't have an engineering degree though. And of course, passing the class doesn't mean you'll be ethical. Knowing the material and acting on it are different. Also, understanding the requirements and working right at the edge of them is engineering...
I had one at University of Michigan, but that was almost a decade ago now.
[flagged]
Or a subordinate?
If you're a guy you are always going to be open to accusations of impropriety with or from a woman.
Whether yours the boss or the subordinate doesn't make a difference.
Best approach is to keep the relationship friendly, cordial and at a distance.
> Best approach is to keep the relationship friendly, cordial and at a distance.
How would that help defend you against the accusation that you resented her not wanting to date you?
> How would that help defend you against the accusation that you resented her
That's the "cordial and friendly" part; if you've never expressed any negativity about her it boosts your credibility.
> not wanting to date you?
That's the "distance" part.
If you've never approached her in private, or for watercooler chat, or had lunch in the cafeteria together, or got coffee together ... that buys you some credibility.
In short, you never reached out to her for anything other than a work request, made in a work-provided channel (email, slack, etc), and only reached out verbally/telephonically/in-person when urgency was required.
I agree with you. However, there are cases were even that kind of behaviour is turned around to stab you as a male... Not making any personal connection is considered creepy by some, and there have been cases were that was reported to HR.
This kind of risk mitigation is probably a losing strategy. Lawyers will find any reason to crucify you.
> This kind of risk mitigation is probably a losing strategy. Lawyers will find any reason to crucify you.
Right, but much better for them to have flimsy reasons that literally won't pass even a cursory glance by a court (like alone time with someone), than give them situations which allows them to introduce doubt about your innocence.
Refusing to work for or hire the opposite sex is also one of those reasons...
Because if your relationship is friendly, cordial and appropriately distanced, there would then be no evidence that you resent her not wanting to date you.
Come on guys, this stuff is pretty simple.
There would also be no evidence that you didn't. They look exactly the same.
All this would do is provide support for the idea that she didn't want to date you, and you were aware of that.
The legal system doesn't require you to prove your innocence
> The legal system doesn't require you to prove your innocence
Only in criminal cases. In civil suits, you'll have to prove your innocence.
Those are just words; they don't describe the actual behavior of the system.
If you don't know how things work, maybe you shouldn't talk as if you do know.
or, and hear me out here: just don't ask them out on a date.
If you read the court transcript, he actually did ask her out on a date and she said no :)
> If you read the court transcript, he actually did ask her out on a date and she said no :)
I didn't read the court transcripts, but my understanding from the various stories was that she claimed he asked her out on a date.
She claimed lots of things, much of which appears to have been outright lies.
No, the stories are very careful, but i get it - they parse words.
AFAIK, he did not deny that he made romantic overtures (or whatever the hell phrase they used, i can look it up again if you care).
If he denied it, i don't see it.
What he denied was that he was resentful she said no, and in any way used it against her :)
If they had no evidence, etc, it would not be an even mildly viable way of attacking his credibility (IE ignoring whether it's smart/dumb/ethical/etc, if wouldn't be effective).
It would also be cut off by a judge very quickly because you'd lack any foundation.
So it would be a very short questioning, too.
IE you'd end up STH like this:
"Q:Did you ever ask her out on a date
A: No
Q: Did you ever flirt with her
A: No
<3 other ways of asking the same question>
Q: So you weren't resentful she declined to date you or flirt back
A: No
"
At this point, if you try to go further, you have no basis on which to do so, it will be objected to, you will be forced to move on. Actually, you probably won't even get to ask the last question if they answer no to all the others, it will get objected to, you will have to withdraw it, the jury will think you are an ass.
You'd have to have evidence to impeach them or ask them about (IE conversations they admitted to, etc).
Or they'd have to say yes to one of these questions, so you could hammer them some more.
A ton of no's like the above where you have nothing else just make you look desperate to a jury, and worse than doing nothing, so you really wouldn't do it, even if you are losing badly.
A particularly revealing aspect of Menchel’s cross-examination focused on Mr. Vovor’s feelings toward Ms. Javice. He admitted to sending her flowers, messages, photos, playlists, and even a card without signing his name, instead using a heart emoji. His behavior had previously led to a human resources complaint by Ms. Javice, resulting in a discussion with the company’s legal and Human Resources representative.
[EDIT: All of the below is now inaccurate]
> AFAIK, he did not deny that he made romantic overtures
Depends on how it's phrased - it's common to preface with "What's not explicitly addressed is denied. My Client reserves the right to address the unaddressed claim in the future." in court papers, but I'm not sure if that works for witness-box testimony.
TBH, if he neither denied it nor admitted it while in the witness box, then it is unlikely he was asked the question "Did you make any romantic overture to $X" at all.
And, to be even more honest, if her lawyer avoided asking that question, it's because he knew the answer already.
> (or whatever the hell phrase they used, i can look it up again if you care).
Actually I cannot find the court transcript (my google fu is failing). Do you have a link?
It seems a pretty important part of this thread's premise; assuming that the main witness [did/did not] ask out his boss on a date.
No surprises here, companies will tell this to your face on day 1. Asking your boss/subordinate out on a date is frowned upon and will be used aggressively against you.
The accusation didn't work.
This time. In many other cases, it work[s,ed].
This seems like something you want to be true more than something that actually is true.
Citation?
If you're a witness with damning evidence, literally anything you will ever do, as well as anything you didn't do will be used to impeach your credibility in court.
That's what lawyers do. They throw shit and see what sticks.
This is the job of a lawyer. And it's a knife that cuts both ways. You hate them when you are on the stop, and you love (?) them when they do your dirty bidding.
What do you call 500 lawyers lying on the bottom of the ocean?
A good start...
(The War of the Roses, 1989)
So, say something like "I can't work for a woman"?
At least this story shows that it can be dangerous and will be abused on purpose. Make of that whatever you like.
No, this story shows that if you ask your boss out on a date, and they say no, and your boss gets in trouble and you are the star witness, they will try to use your idiocy against you.
Why do you insist on making this about one-way false claims of sexual harassment, etc, that didn't happen, when it's about something that did happen.
This guy did ask his boss out on a date. Which is just ... beyond stupid. Yet somehow you insist on making this about things that did not.
You seem to have a serious axe to grind.
It's a very new account and says stuff like this. It's a pattern if you've been on HN long enough. I suggest we don't feed the troll.
[dead]
don’t think you can generalize to all women from this story. might as well say “never work for a man”. men have done plenty of bad things as bosses.
have you yourself had a bad experience with women in management?
Did you read the transcript?
He actually did ask her out on a date.
Maybe just don't ask your boss out on a date?
It's not only about having a boss. When a man and a woman land on opposite sides, the man stands a risk to be accused of sexual harassment, misconduct and being misogynistic.
Can you provide clarification?
Can you stop pretending you need clarification on what is meant here?
I just presumed it was guy on guy.
Modern sexuality might mean that avoiding the opposite sex is off little help. Instead you need to know how to avoid manipulative sociopaths - which takes years of experience to learn (and perhaps after you learn the skills you decide to join them).
Yeah, I slipped by not mentioning homosexuality. However, while we are at pedantry: Homosexuality isn't particularily a modern phenomenon either. So we both erred on the side of inclusive speech... However, it doesn't really matter in this context, I was particularily refering to male/female, given the whole metoo thing and "trust all women" and all that. As a male, you're particularily exposed to female claims usually being the end of your reputation.
Fraud is fraud, but I'm happy JPMorgan got caught up in this mess. Buying a promising startup for its technology or product is one thing, but the bank literally only cared about the personal data of its supposed 4 million high school and college aged users. Good riddance the whole thing imploded and there weren't real teenagers being spammed credit card and car loan offers.
One funny aspect is that Javice had an employment contract with JPM that stated JPM would pay for legal defense related to her official duties. Her lawyer argued that means JPM has to pay for her civil and criminal defense lawyers, and the court agreed!
It supposedly costs $1000+ to acquire a bank customer. When I worked at a Neobank, our valuations were based on that number multiplied by the number of customers we had and people believed our valuations. Never had problems raising money.
I will never forget the situation of a friend whose father committed check fraud in her name when she was still a child meaning she was never able to have a bank account in her name her whole life (without sending her father back to jail).
I suspect the high valuation is because there are a lot of people like my friend or her dad who can't be on that list of possible banking customers because they can't have a bank account at all.
I really like the idea of everyone having a permanent, fee-free bank account with the federal reserve. It can be zero interest as far as I'm concerned but it should be accessible to everyone regardless of criminal history.
> zero interest
this mean that you are losing anything between 1% and 10% of your money per year (aka inflation). I am not advocating for big banks (which had put food on my table for most of my life) but you only need a (zero-interest) checking account with a debit card for your spending money. Everything else (imho) is most beneficial if you keep them spread out/hidden away, and serving your other purposes (a balance of growth x availability x speed_of_withdrawing).
I remember watching this vid (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auzLhKvsxnQ) many years (it feels like it was way before the 6y YT says its age is). I do a combination of this video and the Dave Ramsey 'envelope system' (but with different banks and with different accounts). Now, she speaks about the "US way of life" but I like the principle/discipline of this.
The federal reserve doesn't want zero risk banking where end customer is effectively 100% on their books, and will deny accounts to any bank that functions the way your service would would work ( see the denial of account to The Narrow Bank ). It's against their monetary policies as it destroys the mechanism by which credit expansion happens.
> “pose undue risk to the stability of the U.S. financial system and would adversely affect the Federal Reserve’s ability to implement monetary policy"
The US Treasury has one, though. Not sure if that satisfies the above criteria.
>I really like the idea of everyone having a permanent, fee-free bank account with the federal reserve. It can be zero interest as far as I'm concerned but it should be accessible to everyone regardless of criminal history.
This might be a great business ideas, starting a bank that caters to criminals. Of course, the fees should be pretty high to offset the risks.
>It supposedly costs $1000+ to acquire a bank customer.
Those were app users, not bank customers. I think that is less valuable.
The social media and other app users have long crossed $100/user price, like a decade ago.
So, their app isn't just an app, it is a financial app. Those users can be valued at several hundred each - thus 300 000 real user they had could really be valued at $100M+, no need to fake.
Meta makes $200+ for each US/Canada active user per year.
I feel like an overlooked aspect of "you can't fool an honest man" is that the honest man probably isn't in your vicinity to begin with.
If Diogenes couldn't find an honest man after all his time spent searching, I question if honest men are anything more than an old wive's tale.
No one who is one ever claims to be one, and vice versa. Easy to miss the existence of anything else, maybe, when the streetlamps insist so loudly on being looked exclusively under.
That sounds a lot like much of Big Tech, too.
Given JPM's complicity in a number of obvious pump and dump frauds, particularly in sell-side "analysis" if you can call it that, I think its somewhat churlish and clearly unfair to allow it access to the legal system to defend fraud against itself. But I suppose rules are for the little people (any non-Trump friends at least.)
I don't understand how one could sell a company with millions of fake users and not expect the purchaser of that company to realize those users are fake?
I understand how one could think you'd get away with it if one were lying to investors who might lack the ability to verify the claims
But actually selling the company? How would that possibly work?
The article tells you that. They generated a fake user accounts database. The only way to catch that is to manually spot check by contacting users. The buyer clearly didn’t.
The article also says
> JPMorgan became interested partly because of the potential it saw in Frank’s supposedly huge list of satisfied clients. The bank believed those future college graduates could become lifelong bank customers
Generating a fake user accounts database would only conceivably work if you expected the purchaser to never attempt to contact any of the business's users, which seems a ludicrous expectation.
The problem fundamentally is during a sale you don't get access to the actual DB. DD you typically only get a subset of data, so whoever you contact or even physically visit, it all could be fake people answering the phone or even at a fake address impersonating whoever they need to.
For $175m of fraud, it's definitely worth to set that up.
The core problem here is - the US lacks the ability to realtime verify identity against a centrally government controlled DB. US would never allow this under privacy rules, but that's what it would take to really identify a particular person.
In every deal, there’s a lot of trust involved leading up to closing that neither side is full of shit. Post-close, though, there is just no world in which a scam like this is not going to be (eventually) found out, and obviously there are legal remedies for that.
I feel like this is, roughly speaking, the system working as intended: Minimal friction to avoid slowing down the 99.9% of deals that don’t involve fraud, and reasonable deterrence for the remaining 0.1%. I’m sure there are lots of ways to prevent deals like this from closing in the first place, but I doubt most are worth the cost.
> reasonable deterrence for the remaining 0.1%.
Given the Trevor Milton pardon, I wouldn't count on that. At this point, you can't rely on legal remedies, you just have to be lucky that the person fucking you over doesn't have the right kind of friends.
Okay that is very fair. But civil penalties do still likely mean you can claw a good amount of your money back if you catch the fraud quickly enough.
> the US would never allow ...
Any sentence of this form needs to be treated with the utmost skepticism these days.
I'm not sure that's the "core problem", it sounds like companies should do diligence on a data asset if that's what they're after.
How can you do diligence against it when you expect the other party to be defrauding you?
Were I a large investor buying something I would:
1. Ask them to let a few of my men to dig into the source code and database in their presence.
2. Hire a company to do investigations, speak with their employees, former employees, customers, investors and businesses partners
3. Use an escrow service, a trusted third party which will verify their claims
4. State in the contract that if the deal goes through and if I discover more than 1% of their claims is fake, they own me double the money
But in this case, the article states JP Morgan was sent all the fake data. They just didn't care to verify it. That is either stupidity or JP Morgan have some careless employees which don't risk anything if their employer loses lots of money because they don't do their jobs, so it might be nepotism.
They did have a third party "verify" the data, Acxiom.
You clearly have no practical experience because no company would agree to those terms. You can get access to source code, but the provision about “owe me double” is straight out of a comic book.
Fraud doesn't stop being illegal at the moment of the sale, as you can see from this case.
I find it hard to believe that there are no third party providers that can do such spot checks by selecting a random sample from the data under an NDA.
They did have a third party "verify" the data, Acxiom.
> At JPMorgan’s insistence, Javice said, she completed the task “over a couple of days and nights.” The professor uploaded Frank’s “customer list”—which now contained the synthetic data—to Acxiom on the morning of Aug. 5, the bank said. Acxiom analyzed the data and provided its report to JPMorgan later that evening. Acxiom destroyed the underlying data as its contract required, Javice said. Three days later, on Aug. 8, JPMorgan agreed to buy Frank for $175 million. Acxiom declined comment.
Analyzed the data and gave report the same evening? What the hell? How on earth Acxiom is not on the hook? Is incompetence a defence? And how can they avoid going bankrupt if they choose that defence because nobody will give any work to a company that admits it? I'm now more intrigued about the Acxiom side of story.
Not one where you can guarantee the actual person.
Having SS number doesn't get you contact details and thusly at the mercy of the one who wants to fraud you
The thing that stands out to me about indicted and convicted fraud cases is how they always spell out “all you had to do was”
Like with onecoin, all they had to do was have a blockchain and it would have been the same standard of non-indictable fraud as everyone else
Here all she had to do was harvest from data brokers
"Knowing that JPMC would have access to Frank’s real and much more limited student data after the close of the acquisition, Javice and another high-ranking Frank executive (the “Frank Executive”) began an effort to create a list of real names that they could pass off as Frank’s customers. To that end, the Frank Executive arranged for Frank to pay $105,000 to a third party data compiler for its in-college student data. Javice arranged for Frank to pay $75,000 to a different data compiler to augment the list the Frank Executive bought with email and phone number data."
She actually tried! In the original complaint, JPMC's lawyers wrote that Javice & Co generated their "user database" by securing a leads list from one data broker, and then turning around and asking a second data broker to enrich it with users' personal information to make it look like a customer list. She hired a college professor freelance to add in synthetic data wherever the data from the brokers was lacking. If the data brokers she worked with had high quality leads, maybe it would've taken longer for them to get caught. :p
Yes, absolutely. It is ludicrous.
But I think the real reason is those people attempting fraud are fundamentally psychopaths: they can't think correctly about a future where they're being caught. They fix the present, one lie at a time, and get an immediate, narcissistic personal reward every time they fool someone.
They also think rules don't apply to them, and most of the time they're right, as they most often get away with it.
[deleted][deleted]
Can't tell you how many times this happens, and the buyer doesn't even go public.
Seller probably had leverage to negotiate limited reps and warranties with no earnout and more cash upfront along with saying no to pre-close diligence.
I’d speculate they convinced themselves that their startup was fundamentally great and they just needed more time for it to attain its full potential. The fake users were just a way to show JPM the company they’d eventually have, so nobody was really going to lose (in their minds).
[deleted][deleted]
The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.
Perhaps she thought that she would be able to wiggle out of it or reach a private settlement that saved JPM some embarrassment or something. Still, that was obviously a very stupid decision.
[deleted]
Is "under 30" in "the Forbes 30 under 30" their age, or the likely upper bound of their prison sentences?
Forbes "30 under 30" actually has up to 600 people a year in 20 categories, and that's just in the USA. Add in international lists and the number rises to well over 1000. Since 2011 there have probably been, what, 10-15 thousand total "honorees"? 3-5 of them going to prison is probably well below average.
For their socio-economic status? Surely.
It’s usually a red flag for someone to not engage with as they have a huge ego and pay to get themselves on that list.
It’s actually just a Forbes marketing ploy. Me and my company made it on the list and they gave us an interview and the guy that interviewed us asked “what is ChatGPT?” And he was supposed to be head of like AI at Forbes. I actually think they somehow make money from it by hosting conferences and stuff. Either way I always was sus of it
I know a couple of people on that list. They are mediocre, at best. So that casts a lot of doubt on Forbes ability/interest in filtering membership.
My sense is that you can network/buy your way onto the list.
You absolutely do pay to be on that list, definitely an anti-signal.
I was put on it in 2015 after an acquaintance of mine that was previously on the list recommended me… I only heard from Forbes a few days before the list came out, they asked me for a photo and asked if I approved the 2 sentence blurb they prepared, and that was it. For years afterwards they would try to get me to come to their events, but I never had any interest, and I assume that was how they made money… but I never paid anything to be on the list or had real interest in being on it, and I don’t think it led to anything other than my technically illiterate parents thinking that it was impressive.
“Most trusted brand” lists work like that.
[deleted]
Usually it's the investors who get people on these lists.
Stanford is an ... interesting place, it seems. I read that if you filtered for Stanford in the Forbes 30 Under 30 lists, they were most notable for having been accused/charged/convicted of stealing/scamming more money than their companies have generated revenue, to a ratio of nearly 3:1.
What’s crazy to me about all of this is that the College Board will happily sell you the contact info for the 2mn students who take the SAT each year.
We’d probably not know about this if Javice just spent 10 minutes thinking, created a small scholarship, bought student contact info to “market” the scholarship, and then used that real data to commit fraud.
Maybe some recipients notice and report something to JPMorgan, but how many 18 year olds are actively reporting spam?
I really don't think that the ankle monitor is going to interfere with Pilates instruction.
Florida absolutely has a nonzero amount of "Pilates teachers with ankle monitors".
> Florida absolutely has a nonzero amount of "Pilates teachers with ankle monitors".
"We gracefully incorporate the ankle monitor into the exercise routine, it's just like an extra weight!"
Now would be a great time for her to pop out a few kids though, if Holmes is any guidance.
Another fraud-star is officially born.
Joining the ranks of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman Fried all under the Forbes’ "30 Under 30" list.
Startup idea: zero knowledge proof audit mechanism for investors to verify usage stats.
Granted that’s a cool idea, but also how about at least an intern doing basic due diligence for your $175M deal. Especially in this case where they had a red flag that she didn’t want to turn over the list until the deal was done.
> Especially in this case where they had a red flag that she didn’t want to turn over the list until the deal was done
I'm not in the game but I think if I was spending this much money I would want some statistically sound samples of the list. Not the whole list, but enough entries to give me a high level of confidence that the list was made up of real people.
e.g. hash the name and DOB of everyone on the list, then give me the list of hashes. That way I know the list is not full of duplicates. Then I will pick say 10 at random, request their details, and make sure their hash can be recreated and that they are real people.
OpenAI claims 400 million weekly active users. Verify that.
Do you know what zero knowledge proofs are? OpenAI could create ZKP that would be easy to verify.
I do.
OpenAI has not done so.
Draw your own conclusions.
If she's smart she salted away a couple million to buy a pardon.
$1.8m at a minmum
Dimon and Musk have feuded in the past. This is honestly in her cards.
If you're going to steal $175M, don't steal it from the most powerful bank on earth.
She was small enough to fail and jail.
Or, steal it and then get out of there, maybe to some place like Indonesia or Kazakhstan. Don't keep hanging out at the offices of the bank you defrauded
Luckily for her, pardons are on sale now.
Guess "fake it till you make it" doesn't scale well.
Scales perfectly well with a 1.8 million donation to the correct place, though. Her mistake was not the fraud, it was the forgotten donation.
Scaled Ms. Holmes up to around 11 years, IIRC.
>Prosecutors said Javice ended up paying a college friend $18,000 to create millions of fake names with pedigree information. The results were sent to JPMorgan’s third-party data provider, but testimony showed that firm never checked to ensure the people were real.
If someone tries to sell me something and I ask for proof, I would be very stupid not to check that evidence.
Why do big banks hire stupid people and let them lead large deals?
So what did the 'due diligence' people actually do on this transaction?
One wonders. I do b2b stuff, so I verify that clients and contracts actually exist. What happens when you're doing DD for this kind of deal where they're effectively buying a client list comprised entirely of individuals? Call a sample?
I somehow have the suspicion that many successful startups began as frauds but their founders either weren't caught or the investors weren't interested to defer them to justice.
Hi Charlie, IANAL, but if you’d like to get out of this mess I suggest you donate $1-2M to Ronald Krump. Enjoy the freedom!
Meanwhile SoftBank is lobbing $40Billion at OpenAI and nobody can really verify if they have the 400 million weekly active users they claim.
> 400 million weekly active users
I find it interesting that it doesn't say "paying" users. Also, I remember there was at least one time when the New York Times allegedly gave away newspapers to boost circulation numbers. If chat gpt does not require a log in and someone uses two different computers logged out on chat gpt at least once a month each, you could argue he is two people as far as the company is concerned?
I don't think anyone is investing that kind of money without doing basic DD.
What makes you think that,
especially in light of the story we are commenting on?
Not to mention the rest of the 30-under-30 prison pipeline.
[deleted]
Her fate is going to come down to whether she pocketed enough from the transaction to purchase a pardon.
The best and the brightest.
Seeing she is still out and able to pay her $2m bail, there will be many who will her story as a success.
Unless she ends up prison for a least 10 years, it's not a bad deal - you get to make millions, be famous, be on the cover of magazines, then chill at home while running a youtube channel, or a write a back about your exploits.
Wait, she's not going to be locked up?
She might be, but so far she is free on a $2 million bail since her 2023 arrest.
[deleted]
I think this current crop of 20-somethings learned something terrible.
20-somethings didn't invent fraud.
(But don't phrase it like that, or they'll argue the point with you, since they think they invented everything. :)
No, but I don't recall a 20 something committing a $175M fraud before this decade. Not on this scale anyway.
Elizabeth Holmes was 31 when she was outed. But most of that scandal was created in her 20's.
Sam Bankman-Fried was in his 20s along with his girlfriend Caroline Ellison.
Billy MacFarland defrauded investors of $26M for the Fyre festival that famously imploded.
Charlie Javice was 29 when she defrauded JPMC with Frank.
I'm not saying there 20 year-olds didn't defraud mulit-millions in the previous decades to this. I just don't remember any. And this generation has far too much of their share.
What changed?
In earlier decades, were nepo babies not as often in a position to do fraud?
Or not motivated to do fraud?
Or not helped to do fraud?
I don't think people were trusted before the 1990s until they were mid to late thirties. Now it's like VC's throw capital at 20 somethings as if they're wunderkind, when they're not fully mature adults mentally yet. Maybe there was some fraud on Wall Street back then, but those people had more access to capital than others.
It's also easy to delude yourself that you deserve all the money -- even if you haven't produced anything of value (Theranos). Or you delude yourself that you're so talented that there's no need for any safeguards (FTX). If there's capital flowing and you're sitting on a pile of cash (which you haven't earned yet only raised), you begin to think you've actually accomplished something when you haven't.
And now with crypto, influencers are basically cashing in their popularity. There's so much cash investors have, and TINA -- there is no alternative potentially high yield investments.
Before maybe in the 2000s investors would actually, like, you know, put insiders in the company and you know "due diligence" and all that, and not trust the word of a 20-something directly.
100 years ago, this twenty-something fellow committed fraud substantial enough to almost destroy the economy of Portugal and was probably a major motivator for a coup d'etat that happened a year after his fraud was discovered.
Thanks for the downvotes anyone going to say why an arbitrary minion will get a presidential pardon? Even if they bribed. Any bribe is nothing, Trump has Elon.
trevor milton donated $2mm to trumps re-election campaign. he got pardoned. any bribe is not nothing if $2mm gets you off after doing brazen fraud.
[deleted]
Nah she doesn't have the bribe money
[deleted]
Bad decision.
> Javice asked an “outside data scientist” to fabricate a list of customers when the bank asked for proof of Frank’s user data, -NBC
If they had 3 million fake accounts and didn’t catch the fraud, then they were in on it.
It’s a great deal. If the company does well, everyone wins. If it doesn’t, then you already know you can claim fraud.
At that point it’s not fraud.
> She asked the Director of Engineering if he could help her take a known set of FAFSA application data and use it to artificially augment a much larger set of anonymous data that her systems had collected over time. The Director of Engineering questioned whether creating and using such a data set was legal, but Javice tried to assure the engineer by claiming that this was perfectly acceptable in an investment situation and she did not believe that anyone would end up in an “orange jumpsuit” over this project
If your boss brings up "orange jumpsuits" in any context, you should probably start looking for a new job. Even if it's to tell you that you won't be wearing one, the fact that the person thinks this way is very sus.
How exactly do you think JPM would benefit from fake customers???
When fake customers generate real customers.
I simply mean they probably knew the business didn’t have that 4 Million customers and they were probably content to buy a business that had 300k customers.
Would you have turned down an early opportunity to invest in Facebook, Reddit, Airbnb, etc, when they were in a fake it till you make it stage? It’s prudent to recognize that yes the business is cooking the books (after all we’re JPM, you don’t think we do some of that ourselves?) and yes they may also be a worthwhile bet.
The way this is different is because those sites were faking it to make their site seem more active to users. Here there's no draw to users it's ONLY for the valuation and purchase. JPM wanted 4 million people unable to fill out a FAFSA but willing to pay to have it done. The exact kind of person who fucks up credit cards and pays $$$ of interest for years.
A person or group working there benefited from it, which is enough for it to happen.
2008 was that at an endemic scale.
Nothing to do with 2008. JP Morgan and the other banks made fees by selling mortgage-backed securities where the real credit risk was obscured by packaging good mortgages with bad.
JP Morgan spending $175m for hot air isn't something they can spin into gold.
Volume!
How does due diligence miss this? Not saying the bank was in on it but it feels like the bank screwed up.
If I remember correctly this fraud was only done after they got acquired. The company's sales/marketing dept asked the newly acquired startup for a customer list to hit up, which is when the founder generated one after being asked repeatedly for it.
Which is when they were caught, emails bounced and they noticed the excel sheet rows matched the total limit in Excel.
So apparently the M&A team trusted the startup was successful when purchasing without seeing the customer list. Most startups get reputation through their press + fancy VC backers giving social credit + a good slide deck, which apparently was enough.
No, the fraud was done during due diligence.
You can read the timeline (from paragraph 63 onwards) here:
A startup would never give away their customer list to during due diligence. That would be insane. Many unscrupulous acquirers would take it, clone the product, and run.
Good point, another commenter above linked to the court records which explained she provided this during due-diligence:
> Javice agreed to provide in the template actual customer data for all fields except email and home street addresses; those she agreed to provide as a “unique ID” due to alleged privacy concerns.
So they did verify it but didn't catch it until the real list was sent.
I'm not sure what JPMorgan could have done before closing the deal realistically. At a point society only works if people tell some version of the truth. It's very hard to protect against blatant and shameless fraud beforehand.
they hired a 3rd party to verify the leads and they basically checked that the row count was 4m and said yeah these look like contacts. if whoever was in contact with this vendor thought this was adequate, that's pretty bad judgment. how hard would it have been to validate a few records?
Agreed, I don't think JPMorgan is much at fault here, besides maybe gambling on a fresh young company, but that's always risky for better or worse. Business is heavily built on relationships and reputation.
[deleted]
> At that point it’s not fraud.
There is no fraud exception where the person gets away with committing the fraud because you think the other party should have caught it.
You’re also mistaken if you think JPM had upside in acquiring a fraudulent business with fraudulent users. There isn’t a scenario where they do well with it because they couldn’t sell a fraudulent company. They become responsible for the fraud if they tried to resell it.
It doesn't matter if they were in on it though. It's still a crime to commit fraud even if the people investing think fraud is good
If they're both doing it, isn't it still fraudulent accounting?
That seems to also help with scaring off potential competitors in that niche.
So, she knew that they knew that she knew that they knew, but what they knew and she didn't know was ___. (You can ask a chat box to fill in the blank there.)
> Frank’s chief software engineer, Patrick Vovor, testified that Javice had asked him to generate synthetic data to support her claim that the company had more than 4 million users. When Vovor asked if that was legal, prosecutors said, Javice and Amar assured him that it was — and told him they didn’t want to end up in orange prison jumpsuits. Vovor testified that he refused to help. “I told them I would not do anything illegal,” Vovor told jurors.
> Seeking to dent Vovor’s credibility, defense lawyers suggested he was resentful that Javice didn’t want to date him.
That is one hell of a defense
This should be used as an example in engineering ethics classes for how important it is to say "no" to your employer when you are asked to do something that doesn't pass the smell test, no matter how trivial it may seem. This simple act saved the guy his career and (potentially) freedom.
You mean like sitting idle by your CEO, while he propagates FSD lies for years that can and will and did get people killed?
https://youtu.be/BFdWsJs6z4c?t=31
> engineering ethics classes
Sidebar: do these exist these days? I mean in software, specifically.
Yes, all accredited institutions are required to have one as part of their Computer Science curriculum.
Yeah, I think it's an ABET requirement for accreditation of engineering degrees.
Lots of people with an engineering title don't have an engineering degree though. And of course, passing the class doesn't mean you'll be ethical. Knowing the material and acting on it are different. Also, understanding the requirements and working right at the edge of them is engineering...
University of Michigan: Great course
https://open.umich.edu/find/open-educational-resources/infor...
If you didn't have one, this is a great book: https://www.amazon.com/Human-Error-James-Reason/dp/052131419...
Was used at Drexel in the 00s.
UIUC still has it, and it is required for a CS degree: https://siebelschool.illinois.edu/academics/courses/cs210
I had one at University of Michigan, but that was almost a decade ago now.
[flagged]
Or a subordinate?
If you're a guy you are always going to be open to accusations of impropriety with or from a woman.
Whether yours the boss or the subordinate doesn't make a difference.
Best approach is to keep the relationship friendly, cordial and at a distance.
> Best approach is to keep the relationship friendly, cordial and at a distance.
How would that help defend you against the accusation that you resented her not wanting to date you?
> How would that help defend you against the accusation that you resented her
That's the "cordial and friendly" part; if you've never expressed any negativity about her it boosts your credibility.
> not wanting to date you?
That's the "distance" part.
If you've never approached her in private, or for watercooler chat, or had lunch in the cafeteria together, or got coffee together ... that buys you some credibility.
In short, you never reached out to her for anything other than a work request, made in a work-provided channel (email, slack, etc), and only reached out verbally/telephonically/in-person when urgency was required.
I agree with you. However, there are cases were even that kind of behaviour is turned around to stab you as a male... Not making any personal connection is considered creepy by some, and there have been cases were that was reported to HR.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UZetLBx5AA
This kind of risk mitigation is probably a losing strategy. Lawyers will find any reason to crucify you.
> This kind of risk mitigation is probably a losing strategy. Lawyers will find any reason to crucify you.
Right, but much better for them to have flimsy reasons that literally won't pass even a cursory glance by a court (like alone time with someone), than give them situations which allows them to introduce doubt about your innocence.
Refusing to work for or hire the opposite sex is also one of those reasons...
Because if your relationship is friendly, cordial and appropriately distanced, there would then be no evidence that you resent her not wanting to date you.
Come on guys, this stuff is pretty simple.
There would also be no evidence that you didn't. They look exactly the same.
All this would do is provide support for the idea that she didn't want to date you, and you were aware of that.
The legal system doesn't require you to prove your innocence
> The legal system doesn't require you to prove your innocence
Only in criminal cases. In civil suits, you'll have to prove your innocence.
Those are just words; they don't describe the actual behavior of the system.
Example?
https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedeta...
If you don't know how things work, maybe you shouldn't talk as if you do know.
or, and hear me out here: just don't ask them out on a date.
If you read the court transcript, he actually did ask her out on a date and she said no :)
> If you read the court transcript, he actually did ask her out on a date and she said no :)
I didn't read the court transcripts, but my understanding from the various stories was that she claimed he asked her out on a date.
She claimed lots of things, much of which appears to have been outright lies.
No, the stories are very careful, but i get it - they parse words.
AFAIK, he did not deny that he made romantic overtures (or whatever the hell phrase they used, i can look it up again if you care).
If he denied it, i don't see it.
What he denied was that he was resentful she said no, and in any way used it against her :)
If they had no evidence, etc, it would not be an even mildly viable way of attacking his credibility (IE ignoring whether it's smart/dumb/ethical/etc, if wouldn't be effective).
It would also be cut off by a judge very quickly because you'd lack any foundation.
So it would be a very short questioning, too.
IE you'd end up STH like this:
"Q:Did you ever ask her out on a date
A: No
Q: Did you ever flirt with her
A: No
<3 other ways of asking the same question>
Q: So you weren't resentful she declined to date you or flirt back
A: No "
At this point, if you try to go further, you have no basis on which to do so, it will be objected to, you will be forced to move on. Actually, you probably won't even get to ask the last question if they answer no to all the others, it will get objected to, you will have to withdraw it, the jury will think you are an ass.
You'd have to have evidence to impeach them or ask them about (IE conversations they admitted to, etc).
Or they'd have to say yes to one of these questions, so you could hammer them some more.
A ton of no's like the above where you have nothing else just make you look desperate to a jury, and worse than doing nothing, so you really wouldn't do it, even if you are losing badly.
[EDIT: Found a link - https://artvoice.com/2025/03/10/witness-testimony-raises-que...]
[EDIT: All of the below is now inaccurate]> AFAIK, he did not deny that he made romantic overtures
Depends on how it's phrased - it's common to preface with "What's not explicitly addressed is denied. My Client reserves the right to address the unaddressed claim in the future." in court papers, but I'm not sure if that works for witness-box testimony.
TBH, if he neither denied it nor admitted it while in the witness box, then it is unlikely he was asked the question "Did you make any romantic overture to $X" at all.
And, to be even more honest, if her lawyer avoided asking that question, it's because he knew the answer already.
> (or whatever the hell phrase they used, i can look it up again if you care).
Actually I cannot find the court transcript (my google fu is failing). Do you have a link?
It seems a pretty important part of this thread's premise; assuming that the main witness [did/did not] ask out his boss on a date.
No surprises here, companies will tell this to your face on day 1. Asking your boss/subordinate out on a date is frowned upon and will be used aggressively against you.
The accusation didn't work.
This time. In many other cases, it work[s,ed].
This seems like something you want to be true more than something that actually is true.
Citation?
If you're a witness with damning evidence, literally anything you will ever do, as well as anything you didn't do will be used to impeach your credibility in court.
That's what lawyers do. They throw shit and see what sticks.
This is the job of a lawyer. And it's a knife that cuts both ways. You hate them when you are on the stop, and you love (?) them when they do your dirty bidding.
So, say something like "I can't work for a woman"?
At least this story shows that it can be dangerous and will be abused on purpose. Make of that whatever you like.
No, this story shows that if you ask your boss out on a date, and they say no, and your boss gets in trouble and you are the star witness, they will try to use your idiocy against you.
Why do you insist on making this about one-way false claims of sexual harassment, etc, that didn't happen, when it's about something that did happen.
This guy did ask his boss out on a date. Which is just ... beyond stupid. Yet somehow you insist on making this about things that did not.
You seem to have a serious axe to grind.
It's a very new account and says stuff like this. It's a pattern if you've been on HN long enough. I suggest we don't feed the troll.
[dead]
don’t think you can generalize to all women from this story. might as well say “never work for a man”. men have done plenty of bad things as bosses.
have you yourself had a bad experience with women in management?
Did you read the transcript?
He actually did ask her out on a date.
Maybe just don't ask your boss out on a date?
It's not only about having a boss. When a man and a woman land on opposite sides, the man stands a risk to be accused of sexual harassment, misconduct and being misogynistic.
Can you provide clarification?
Can you stop pretending you need clarification on what is meant here?
I just presumed it was guy on guy.
Modern sexuality might mean that avoiding the opposite sex is off little help. Instead you need to know how to avoid manipulative sociopaths - which takes years of experience to learn (and perhaps after you learn the skills you decide to join them).
Yeah, I slipped by not mentioning homosexuality. However, while we are at pedantry: Homosexuality isn't particularily a modern phenomenon either. So we both erred on the side of inclusive speech... However, it doesn't really matter in this context, I was particularily refering to male/female, given the whole metoo thing and "trust all women" and all that. As a male, you're particularily exposed to female claims usually being the end of your reputation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense
Fraud is fraud, but I'm happy JPMorgan got caught up in this mess. Buying a promising startup for its technology or product is one thing, but the bank literally only cared about the personal data of its supposed 4 million high school and college aged users. Good riddance the whole thing imploded and there weren't real teenagers being spammed credit card and car loan offers.
One funny aspect is that Javice had an employment contract with JPM that stated JPM would pay for legal defense related to her official duties. Her lawyer argued that means JPM has to pay for her civil and criminal defense lawyers, and the court agreed!
It supposedly costs $1000+ to acquire a bank customer. When I worked at a Neobank, our valuations were based on that number multiplied by the number of customers we had and people believed our valuations. Never had problems raising money.
I will never forget the situation of a friend whose father committed check fraud in her name when she was still a child meaning she was never able to have a bank account in her name her whole life (without sending her father back to jail).
I suspect the high valuation is because there are a lot of people like my friend or her dad who can't be on that list of possible banking customers because they can't have a bank account at all.
I really like the idea of everyone having a permanent, fee-free bank account with the federal reserve. It can be zero interest as far as I'm concerned but it should be accessible to everyone regardless of criminal history.
> zero interest
this mean that you are losing anything between 1% and 10% of your money per year (aka inflation). I am not advocating for big banks (which had put food on my table for most of my life) but you only need a (zero-interest) checking account with a debit card for your spending money. Everything else (imho) is most beneficial if you keep them spread out/hidden away, and serving your other purposes (a balance of growth x availability x speed_of_withdrawing).
I remember watching this vid (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auzLhKvsxnQ) many years (it feels like it was way before the 6y YT says its age is). I do a combination of this video and the Dave Ramsey 'envelope system' (but with different banks and with different accounts). Now, she speaks about the "US way of life" but I like the principle/discipline of this.
The federal reserve doesn't want zero risk banking where end customer is effectively 100% on their books, and will deny accounts to any bank that functions the way your service would would work ( see the denial of account to The Narrow Bank ). It's against their monetary policies as it destroys the mechanism by which credit expansion happens.
> “pose undue risk to the stability of the U.S. financial system and would adversely affect the Federal Reserve’s ability to implement monetary policy"
https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/safest-bank-fed-wont-san...
The US Treasury has one, though. Not sure if that satisfies the above criteria.
>I really like the idea of everyone having a permanent, fee-free bank account with the federal reserve. It can be zero interest as far as I'm concerned but it should be accessible to everyone regardless of criminal history.
This might be a great business ideas, starting a bank that caters to criminals. Of course, the fees should be pretty high to offset the risks.
>It supposedly costs $1000+ to acquire a bank customer.
Those were app users, not bank customers. I think that is less valuable.
The social media and other app users have long crossed $100/user price, like a decade ago.
So, their app isn't just an app, it is a financial app. Those users can be valued at several hundred each - thus 300 000 real user they had could really be valued at $100M+, no need to fake.
Meta makes $200+ for each US/Canada active user per year.
I feel like an overlooked aspect of "you can't fool an honest man" is that the honest man probably isn't in your vicinity to begin with.
If Diogenes couldn't find an honest man after all his time spent searching, I question if honest men are anything more than an old wive's tale.
No one who is one ever claims to be one, and vice versa. Easy to miss the existence of anything else, maybe, when the streetlamps insist so loudly on being looked exclusively under.
That sounds a lot like much of Big Tech, too.
Given JPM's complicity in a number of obvious pump and dump frauds, particularly in sell-side "analysis" if you can call it that, I think its somewhat churlish and clearly unfair to allow it access to the legal system to defend fraud against itself. But I suppose rules are for the little people (any non-Trump friends at least.)
I don't understand how one could sell a company with millions of fake users and not expect the purchaser of that company to realize those users are fake?
I understand how one could think you'd get away with it if one were lying to investors who might lack the ability to verify the claims
But actually selling the company? How would that possibly work?
The article tells you that. They generated a fake user accounts database. The only way to catch that is to manually spot check by contacting users. The buyer clearly didn’t.
The article also says
> JPMorgan became interested partly because of the potential it saw in Frank’s supposedly huge list of satisfied clients. The bank believed those future college graduates could become lifelong bank customers
Generating a fake user accounts database would only conceivably work if you expected the purchaser to never attempt to contact any of the business's users, which seems a ludicrous expectation.
The problem fundamentally is during a sale you don't get access to the actual DB. DD you typically only get a subset of data, so whoever you contact or even physically visit, it all could be fake people answering the phone or even at a fake address impersonating whoever they need to.
For $175m of fraud, it's definitely worth to set that up.
The core problem here is - the US lacks the ability to realtime verify identity against a centrally government controlled DB. US would never allow this under privacy rules, but that's what it would take to really identify a particular person.
In every deal, there’s a lot of trust involved leading up to closing that neither side is full of shit. Post-close, though, there is just no world in which a scam like this is not going to be (eventually) found out, and obviously there are legal remedies for that.
I feel like this is, roughly speaking, the system working as intended: Minimal friction to avoid slowing down the 99.9% of deals that don’t involve fraud, and reasonable deterrence for the remaining 0.1%. I’m sure there are lots of ways to prevent deals like this from closing in the first place, but I doubt most are worth the cost.
> reasonable deterrence for the remaining 0.1%.
Given the Trevor Milton pardon, I wouldn't count on that. At this point, you can't rely on legal remedies, you just have to be lucky that the person fucking you over doesn't have the right kind of friends.
Okay that is very fair. But civil penalties do still likely mean you can claw a good amount of your money back if you catch the fraud quickly enough.
> the US would never allow ...
Any sentence of this form needs to be treated with the utmost skepticism these days.
I'm not sure that's the "core problem", it sounds like companies should do diligence on a data asset if that's what they're after.
How can you do diligence against it when you expect the other party to be defrauding you?
Were I a large investor buying something I would:
1. Ask them to let a few of my men to dig into the source code and database in their presence.
2. Hire a company to do investigations, speak with their employees, former employees, customers, investors and businesses partners
3. Use an escrow service, a trusted third party which will verify their claims
4. State in the contract that if the deal goes through and if I discover more than 1% of their claims is fake, they own me double the money
But in this case, the article states JP Morgan was sent all the fake data. They just didn't care to verify it. That is either stupidity or JP Morgan have some careless employees which don't risk anything if their employer loses lots of money because they don't do their jobs, so it might be nepotism.
They did have a third party "verify" the data, Acxiom.
https://fortune.com/2023/04/11/synthetic-data-millennial-fou...
You clearly have no practical experience because no company would agree to those terms. You can get access to source code, but the provision about “owe me double” is straight out of a comic book.
Fraud doesn't stop being illegal at the moment of the sale, as you can see from this case.
I find it hard to believe that there are no third party providers that can do such spot checks by selecting a random sample from the data under an NDA.
They did have a third party "verify" the data, Acxiom.
https://fortune.com/2023/04/11/synthetic-data-millennial-fou...
Thanks for the link:
> At JPMorgan’s insistence, Javice said, she completed the task “over a couple of days and nights.” The professor uploaded Frank’s “customer list”—which now contained the synthetic data—to Acxiom on the morning of Aug. 5, the bank said. Acxiom analyzed the data and provided its report to JPMorgan later that evening. Acxiom destroyed the underlying data as its contract required, Javice said. Three days later, on Aug. 8, JPMorgan agreed to buy Frank for $175 million. Acxiom declined comment.
Analyzed the data and gave report the same evening? What the hell? How on earth Acxiom is not on the hook? Is incompetence a defence? And how can they avoid going bankrupt if they choose that defence because nobody will give any work to a company that admits it? I'm now more intrigued about the Acxiom side of story.
Not one where you can guarantee the actual person.
Having SS number doesn't get you contact details and thusly at the mercy of the one who wants to fraud you
The thing that stands out to me about indicted and convicted fraud cases is how they always spell out “all you had to do was”
Like with onecoin, all they had to do was have a blockchain and it would have been the same standard of non-indictable fraud as everyone else
Here all she had to do was harvest from data brokers
She did harvest from data brokers. The AP article doesn't really get into this, but the SEC complaint (https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/complaints/2023/comp-pr...) explains:
"Knowing that JPMC would have access to Frank’s real and much more limited student data after the close of the acquisition, Javice and another high-ranking Frank executive (the “Frank Executive”) began an effort to create a list of real names that they could pass off as Frank’s customers. To that end, the Frank Executive arranged for Frank to pay $105,000 to a third party data compiler for its in-college student data. Javice arranged for Frank to pay $75,000 to a different data compiler to augment the list the Frank Executive bought with email and phone number data."
She actually tried! In the original complaint, JPMC's lawyers wrote that Javice & Co generated their "user database" by securing a leads list from one data broker, and then turning around and asking a second data broker to enrich it with users' personal information to make it look like a customer list. She hired a college professor freelance to add in synthetic data wherever the data from the brokers was lacking. If the data brokers she worked with had high quality leads, maybe it would've taken longer for them to get caught. :p
Yes, absolutely. It is ludicrous.
But I think the real reason is those people attempting fraud are fundamentally psychopaths: they can't think correctly about a future where they're being caught. They fix the present, one lie at a time, and get an immediate, narcissistic personal reward every time they fool someone.
They also think rules don't apply to them, and most of the time they're right, as they most often get away with it.
Can't tell you how many times this happens, and the buyer doesn't even go public.
Seller probably had leverage to negotiate limited reps and warranties with no earnout and more cash upfront along with saying no to pre-close diligence.
I’d speculate they convinced themselves that their startup was fundamentally great and they just needed more time for it to attain its full potential. The fake users were just a way to show JPM the company they’d eventually have, so nobody was really going to lose (in their minds).
The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.
Perhaps she thought that she would be able to wiggle out of it or reach a private settlement that saved JPM some embarrassment or something. Still, that was obviously a very stupid decision.
Is "under 30" in "the Forbes 30 under 30" their age, or the likely upper bound of their prison sentences?
Forbes "30 under 30" actually has up to 600 people a year in 20 categories, and that's just in the USA. Add in international lists and the number rises to well over 1000. Since 2011 there have probably been, what, 10-15 thousand total "honorees"? 3-5 of them going to prison is probably well below average.
For their socio-economic status? Surely.
It’s usually a red flag for someone to not engage with as they have a huge ego and pay to get themselves on that list.
It’s actually just a Forbes marketing ploy. Me and my company made it on the list and they gave us an interview and the guy that interviewed us asked “what is ChatGPT?” And he was supposed to be head of like AI at Forbes. I actually think they somehow make money from it by hosting conferences and stuff. Either way I always was sus of it
I know a couple of people on that list. They are mediocre, at best. So that casts a lot of doubt on Forbes ability/interest in filtering membership.
My sense is that you can network/buy your way onto the list.
You absolutely do pay to be on that list, definitely an anti-signal.
I was put on it in 2015 after an acquaintance of mine that was previously on the list recommended me… I only heard from Forbes a few days before the list came out, they asked me for a photo and asked if I approved the 2 sentence blurb they prepared, and that was it. For years afterwards they would try to get me to come to their events, but I never had any interest, and I assume that was how they made money… but I never paid anything to be on the list or had real interest in being on it, and I don’t think it led to anything other than my technically illiterate parents thinking that it was impressive.
“Most trusted brand” lists work like that.
Usually it's the investors who get people on these lists.
Stanford is an ... interesting place, it seems. I read that if you filtered for Stanford in the Forbes 30 Under 30 lists, they were most notable for having been accused/charged/convicted of stealing/scamming more money than their companies have generated revenue, to a ratio of nearly 3:1.
What’s crazy to me about all of this is that the College Board will happily sell you the contact info for the 2mn students who take the SAT each year.
We’d probably not know about this if Javice just spent 10 minutes thinking, created a small scholarship, bought student contact info to “market” the scholarship, and then used that real data to commit fraud.
Maybe some recipients notice and report something to JPMorgan, but how many 18 year olds are actively reporting spam?
I really don't think that the ankle monitor is going to interfere with Pilates instruction.
Florida absolutely has a nonzero amount of "Pilates teachers with ankle monitors".
> Florida absolutely has a nonzero amount of "Pilates teachers with ankle monitors".
"We gracefully incorporate the ankle monitor into the exercise routine, it's just like an extra weight!"
Now would be a great time for her to pop out a few kids though, if Holmes is any guidance.
Another fraud-star is officially born.
Joining the ranks of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman Fried all under the Forbes’ "30 Under 30" list.
Lots more: https://www.bu.edu/rbfl/2023/05/17/30-under-30-pipeline-to-p...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/apr/06/forbes-30-u...
Related discussion
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35441211
How many other stats we see are faked?
She claimed 4.25m users only 300k real.
Startup idea: zero knowledge proof audit mechanism for investors to verify usage stats.
Granted that’s a cool idea, but also how about at least an intern doing basic due diligence for your $175M deal. Especially in this case where they had a red flag that she didn’t want to turn over the list until the deal was done.
> Especially in this case where they had a red flag that she didn’t want to turn over the list until the deal was done
I'm not in the game but I think if I was spending this much money I would want some statistically sound samples of the list. Not the whole list, but enough entries to give me a high level of confidence that the list was made up of real people.
e.g. hash the name and DOB of everyone on the list, then give me the list of hashes. That way I know the list is not full of duplicates. Then I will pick say 10 at random, request their details, and make sure their hash can be recreated and that they are real people.
OpenAI claims 400 million weekly active users. Verify that.
Do you know what zero knowledge proofs are? OpenAI could create ZKP that would be easy to verify.
I do. OpenAI has not done so. Draw your own conclusions.
If she's smart she salted away a couple million to buy a pardon.
$1.8m at a minmum
Dimon and Musk have feuded in the past. This is honestly in her cards.
If you're going to steal $175M, don't steal it from the most powerful bank on earth.
She was small enough to fail and jail.
Or, steal it and then get out of there, maybe to some place like Indonesia or Kazakhstan. Don't keep hanging out at the offices of the bank you defrauded
Luckily for her, pardons are on sale now.
Guess "fake it till you make it" doesn't scale well.
Scales perfectly well with a 1.8 million donation to the correct place, though. Her mistake was not the fraud, it was the forgotten donation.
Scaled Ms. Holmes up to around 11 years, IIRC.
>Prosecutors said Javice ended up paying a college friend $18,000 to create millions of fake names with pedigree information. The results were sent to JPMorgan’s third-party data provider, but testimony showed that firm never checked to ensure the people were real.
If someone tries to sell me something and I ask for proof, I would be very stupid not to check that evidence.
Why do big banks hire stupid people and let them lead large deals?
So what did the 'due diligence' people actually do on this transaction?
One wonders. I do b2b stuff, so I verify that clients and contracts actually exist. What happens when you're doing DD for this kind of deal where they're effectively buying a client list comprised entirely of individuals? Call a sample?
I somehow have the suspicion that many successful startups began as frauds but their founders either weren't caught or the investors weren't interested to defer them to justice.
Hi Charlie, IANAL, but if you’d like to get out of this mess I suggest you donate $1-2M to Ronald Krump. Enjoy the freedom!
Meanwhile SoftBank is lobbing $40Billion at OpenAI and nobody can really verify if they have the 400 million weekly active users they claim.
> 400 million weekly active users
I find it interesting that it doesn't say "paying" users. Also, I remember there was at least one time when the New York Times allegedly gave away newspapers to boost circulation numbers. If chat gpt does not require a log in and someone uses two different computers logged out on chat gpt at least once a month each, you could argue he is two people as far as the company is concerned?
I don't think anyone is investing that kind of money without doing basic DD.
What makes you think that, especially in light of the story we are commenting on? Not to mention the rest of the 30-under-30 prison pipeline.
Her fate is going to come down to whether she pocketed enough from the transaction to purchase a pardon.
The best and the brightest.
Seeing she is still out and able to pay her $2m bail, there will be many who will her story as a success.
Unless she ends up prison for a least 10 years, it's not a bad deal - you get to make millions, be famous, be on the cover of magazines, then chill at home while running a youtube channel, or a write a back about your exploits.
Wait, she's not going to be locked up?
She might be, but so far she is free on a $2 million bail since her 2023 arrest.
I think this current crop of 20-somethings learned something terrible.
20-somethings didn't invent fraud.
(But don't phrase it like that, or they'll argue the point with you, since they think they invented everything. :)
No, but I don't recall a 20 something committing a $175M fraud before this decade. Not on this scale anyway.
Elizabeth Holmes was 31 when she was outed. But most of that scandal was created in her 20's.
Sam Bankman-Fried was in his 20s along with his girlfriend Caroline Ellison.
Billy MacFarland defrauded investors of $26M for the Fyre festival that famously imploded.
Charlie Javice was 29 when she defrauded JPMC with Frank.
I'm not saying there 20 year-olds didn't defraud mulit-millions in the previous decades to this. I just don't remember any. And this generation has far too much of their share.
What changed?
In earlier decades, were nepo babies not as often in a position to do fraud?
Or not motivated to do fraud?
Or not helped to do fraud?
I don't think people were trusted before the 1990s until they were mid to late thirties. Now it's like VC's throw capital at 20 somethings as if they're wunderkind, when they're not fully mature adults mentally yet. Maybe there was some fraud on Wall Street back then, but those people had more access to capital than others.
It's also easy to delude yourself that you deserve all the money -- even if you haven't produced anything of value (Theranos). Or you delude yourself that you're so talented that there's no need for any safeguards (FTX). If there's capital flowing and you're sitting on a pile of cash (which you haven't earned yet only raised), you begin to think you've actually accomplished something when you haven't.
And now with crypto, influencers are basically cashing in their popularity. There's so much cash investors have, and TINA -- there is no alternative potentially high yield investments.
Before maybe in the 2000s investors would actually, like, you know, put insiders in the company and you know "due diligence" and all that, and not trust the word of a 20-something directly.
100 years ago, this twenty-something fellow committed fraud substantial enough to almost destroy the economy of Portugal and was probably a major motivator for a coup d'etat that happened a year after his fraud was discovered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alves_dos_Reis
So deserved.
Forbes 30 Under 30!
Pardon inbound
It's likely a state crime, so if there were a pardon it wouldn't be from Trump.
The second paragraph in TFA says this was Federal court. I think a pardon is unlikely, regardless.
Defrauding enough money to pay for a pardon is the new meta.
/s in case it wasn’t obvious
Federal https://apnews.com/article/frank-javice-fraud-schools-f6058d...
Why?
Most recently, https://www.axios.com/2025/03/31/trump-pardons-bitmex-crypto...
More information:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_granted_executi...
Thanks for the downvotes anyone going to say why an arbitrary minion will get a presidential pardon? Even if they bribed. Any bribe is nothing, Trump has Elon.
trevor milton donated $2mm to trumps re-election campaign. he got pardoned. any bribe is not nothing if $2mm gets you off after doing brazen fraud.
Nah she doesn't have the bribe money
Bad decision.
> Javice asked an “outside data scientist” to fabricate a list of customers when the bank asked for proof of Frank’s user data, -NBC
If they had 3 million fake accounts and didn’t catch the fraud, then they were in on it.
It’s a great deal. If the company does well, everyone wins. If it doesn’t, then you already know you can claim fraud.
At that point it’s not fraud.
> She asked the Director of Engineering if he could help her take a known set of FAFSA application data and use it to artificially augment a much larger set of anonymous data that her systems had collected over time. The Director of Engineering questioned whether creating and using such a data set was legal, but Javice tried to assure the engineer by claiming that this was perfectly acceptable in an investment situation and she did not believe that anyone would end up in an “orange jumpsuit” over this project
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23570243-frank_suit/...
If your boss brings up "orange jumpsuits" in any context, you should probably start looking for a new job. Even if it's to tell you that you won't be wearing one, the fact that the person thinks this way is very sus.
How exactly do you think JPM would benefit from fake customers???
When fake customers generate real customers.
I simply mean they probably knew the business didn’t have that 4 Million customers and they were probably content to buy a business that had 300k customers.
Would you have turned down an early opportunity to invest in Facebook, Reddit, Airbnb, etc, when they were in a fake it till you make it stage? It’s prudent to recognize that yes the business is cooking the books (after all we’re JPM, you don’t think we do some of that ourselves?) and yes they may also be a worthwhile bet.
The way this is different is because those sites were faking it to make their site seem more active to users. Here there's no draw to users it's ONLY for the valuation and purchase. JPM wanted 4 million people unable to fill out a FAFSA but willing to pay to have it done. The exact kind of person who fucks up credit cards and pays $$$ of interest for years.
A person or group working there benefited from it, which is enough for it to happen.
2008 was that at an endemic scale.
Nothing to do with 2008. JP Morgan and the other banks made fees by selling mortgage-backed securities where the real credit risk was obscured by packaging good mortgages with bad.
JP Morgan spending $175m for hot air isn't something they can spin into gold.
Volume!
How does due diligence miss this? Not saying the bank was in on it but it feels like the bank screwed up.
If I remember correctly this fraud was only done after they got acquired. The company's sales/marketing dept asked the newly acquired startup for a customer list to hit up, which is when the founder generated one after being asked repeatedly for it.
Which is when they were caught, emails bounced and they noticed the excel sheet rows matched the total limit in Excel.
So apparently the M&A team trusted the startup was successful when purchasing without seeing the customer list. Most startups get reputation through their press + fancy VC backers giving social credit + a good slide deck, which apparently was enough.
No, the fraud was done during due diligence.
You can read the timeline (from paragraph 63 onwards) here:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23570243-frank_suit/...
A startup would never give away their customer list to during due diligence. That would be insane. Many unscrupulous acquirers would take it, clone the product, and run.
Good point, another commenter above linked to the court records which explained she provided this during due-diligence:
> Javice agreed to provide in the template actual customer data for all fields except email and home street addresses; those she agreed to provide as a “unique ID” due to alleged privacy concerns.
So they did verify it but didn't catch it until the real list was sent.
I'm not sure what JPMorgan could have done before closing the deal realistically. At a point society only works if people tell some version of the truth. It's very hard to protect against blatant and shameless fraud beforehand.
they hired a 3rd party to verify the leads and they basically checked that the row count was 4m and said yeah these look like contacts. if whoever was in contact with this vendor thought this was adequate, that's pretty bad judgment. how hard would it have been to validate a few records?
Agreed, I don't think JPMorgan is much at fault here, besides maybe gambling on a fresh young company, but that's always risky for better or worse. Business is heavily built on relationships and reputation.
> At that point it’s not fraud.
There is no fraud exception where the person gets away with committing the fraud because you think the other party should have caught it.
You’re also mistaken if you think JPM had upside in acquiring a fraudulent business with fraudulent users. There isn’t a scenario where they do well with it because they couldn’t sell a fraudulent company. They become responsible for the fraud if they tried to resell it.
It doesn't matter if they were in on it though. It's still a crime to commit fraud even if the people investing think fraud is good
If they're both doing it, isn't it still fraudulent accounting?
That seems to also help with scaring off potential competitors in that niche.
So, she knew that they knew that she knew that they knew, but what they knew and she didn't know was ___. (You can ask a chat box to fill in the blank there.)