According to internal texts published Thursday in a legal document, employees of a firm bought by JPMorgan Chase expressed surprise when the company’s founder urged them to increase their client count ahead of the transaction.
According to the complaint, the creator, Charlie Javice, authorized staff to modify the “public-facing numbers” of the college aid platform Frank to 4.25 million customers in January 2021. According to JPMorgan, Frank had less than 300,000 genuine clients when it was purchased in September 2021.
In a January 2021 Slack conversation, one Frank employee inquired, “Do we really have 4.25M students?”
“Is this real?” someone other inquired?
“Charlie is the king of finding magic numbers,” another employee, whose name was blacked out in the complaint, wrote.
The publication of confidential employee texts is the latest salvo in Javice’s legal battle with JPMorgan, which paid $175 million for the business. JPMorgan, the largest bank in the United States by assets and a frequent purchaser of fintech firms, sued Javice in December 2022, saying that the founder lied about the size of her company in order to clinch the deal.
According to the complaint on Thursday, Javice explained the change in user statistics by informing staff that website visits counted as customers.
JPMorgan said in its first complaint that Javice recruited a data science professor to create bogus accounts when an employee declined to do so.
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Javice’s issues have gotten worse in recent weeks. The business founder was prosecuted criminally by the Department of Justice in April and sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission, both of which accused her of fraud in connection with the firm sale.
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In court documents, Javice stated that JPMorgan knew how many users Frank had and that the bank attempted to blame her for its faults.
Javice’s lawyer did not immediately reply to inquiries left late Thursday.
