Workers at Frank — the embattled startup headed by Charlie Javice — reportedly questioned the company’s financials before JPMorgan Chase purchased the company for $175 million in 2021, and even referred to their boss as the “king of finding magic numbers.”
A court document filed in Delaware on Thursday revealed internal Slack messages between Frank employees, who questioned “is this real?” when Javice “directed her to team to change Frank’s public-facing numbers” to 4.25 million users, according to court papers.
Customers of Frank, a financial planning site for college students, were believed to be closer to the tune of 300,000, according to accusations by JPMorgan, which has sued over getting bilked by Javice in the deal.
A Slack exchange included in the Thursday court filing redacted staffers’ names, but showed an exchange where “junior members of the team expressed uniform disbelief” over the allegedly inflated statistics.
“Do we really have 4.25M students?” one worker wrote, to which others replied: “Why do I feel like it’s so much smaller” and “I don’t know where they get this number.”
“Is this real?” another staffer queried.
Another, meanwhile, referred to the multimillion figure as “Charlie numbers.”
The internal conversations took place in January 2021 — the same month JPMorgan purchased Frank, marketed as a tool to help simplify college financial aid applications for students and parents — and showed aghast employees referring to Javice as “king of finding magic numbers.”
Lawyers for Javice declined to comment on Thursday’s court filing.
Javice was arrested in early April and charged with defrauding JPMorgan into buying her now-shuttered college financial aid startup under the guise that millions of customers would come with it.
A four-count indictment made public last month showed that Javice is facing federal charges of securities fraud, wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy, which are each punishable with up to 30 years in prison.
The indictment was filed 15 days after prosecutors said they and defense lawyers were in talks “regarding a possible disposition of this case,” language that sometimes foreshadows a guilty plea.
The 31-year-old pleaded not guilty to the charges, and justified the change in user stats by treating website visitors as users, Thursday’s court filing said.
However, JPMorgan alleges that they were informed of Frank’s users based on its “prior reporting metric,” where customers were required to provide their name, email, phone number and a password to be considered a user.
When JPMorgan asked for proof of Frank customers, Javice allegedly paid “outside data scientist” $18,000 to create a fake user base list. The spoofed data allegedly helped to secure JPMorgan’s commitment to a deal.
JPMorgan has said it learned of Javice’s alleged fraud after receiving few responses when it sent marketing materials to people whom she claimed were real.
Representatives for JPMorgan did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Javice has maintained that the Wall Street giant knew how many users Frank had at the time of the acquisition.
The New York native and Ivy League graduate has been free on $2 million bail since her first court appearance on April 4, a day after she was arrested.
Before selling Frank, Javice received much media praise for her work, including on Forbes magazine’s “30 Under 30” finance list and Crain’s New York Business’ “40 Under 40” list in 2019.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
