30 under 30-year sentences: why so many of Forbes’ young heroes face jail
J ust a few years ago, Charlie Javice was riding high. In 2019 the tech CEO landed a spot on Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list for her work on a startup called Frank, which she described as “Amazon for higher education”. What does that catchy but completely empty phrase mean? It means Frank helped students navigate the financial aid process. It was apparently so successfully at doing this that JPMorgan Chase acquired the company for $175m in 2021 and Javice was made a managing partner at the bank. The entrepreneur shared the news on LinkedIn, boasting that in just four years Frank had grown to serve “over 5 million students at over 6,000 colleges”.
Turns out those numbers might have been just a teeny bit exaggerated. On Tuesday Javice, 31, was charged by the justice department with “falsely and dramatically inflating the number of customers of her company” in order to get JPMorgan Chase to buy it. According to the lawsuit, Frank only had about 300,000 clients and fabricated data to show a larger customer base. She enlisted a data scientist to make up a few million customers, basically, and JPMorgan, which has about 240,000 employees and pays its CEO $34.5m for his expertise, didn’t seem to spot this in its due diligence.
Javice has been charged with separate counts of conspiracy to commit wire and bank fraud, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison. Javice has denied all the allegations against her.
Javice, as eagle-eyed Twitter users were quick to note, is not the first Forbes 30 Under 30 alum to suddenly be looking at decades in jail. In 2021, Sam Bankman-Fried, a self-described “effective altruist”, made the list. Following the dramatic collapse of his former crypto exchange FTX, he’s facing a litany of
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