She Sold Her Startup To JPMorgan For $175 Million. The 4 Million Users Did Not Exist. 🎓

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]She sold her startup to JP [music] Morgan Chase for $175 million.

[00:00:05]She said her company had 4 million student users. She had 300,000.

[00:00:10]To close the deal, she paid a [music] data science professor $18,000 to invent 4 million fake students with fake names, fake [music] addresses, and fake birth dates. Charlie Javis founded Frank in 2017. [music] She was 24 years old. She built a website that helped students apply for federal financial aid. She called it the Amazon of higher education. By 2021, [music] Forbes had named her to its 30 under30 list. She gave TED talks. She raised millions in venture funding. In September 2021, [music] JP Morgan Chase agreed to acquire Frank for $175 million. JP Morgan wanted access to Frank's [music] 4.25 25 million student customers to market banking products.

[00:00:56]Charlie claimed [music] Frank had 4.25 million users. Frank had 300,000.

[00:01:03]To close the deal, Charlie hired a data science professor at Alageney College in Pennsylvania. She paid him $18,000 [music] to generate a synthetic data set of fake student profiles. He invented 4.25 [music] million names, addresses, and birth dates using an algorithm. JP Morgan paid the $175 million and acquired Frank in September 2021.

[00:01:26]Two months later, JP Morgan launched a marketing email campaign to [music] the new student users. 70% of the emails bounced. JP Morgan sued Charlie in January 2023. Federal prosecutors charged her in April 2023. A New York jury convicted her on four counts of [music] fraud in March 2025. In September 2025, she was sentenced to 7 years in federal prison.