The 31-year-old accused of deceiving a Wall Street giant in $US175m deal

Javice started Frank in 2017 and was named to Forbes’s “30 Under 30” list of promising young talents two years later. In 2023, the former rising star was moved to the magazine’s “Hall of Shame,” a list of “30 Under 30” picks it wished it could do over. She shares that distinction with FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried and Martin Shkreli, the ex-con founder of Retrophin and one-time “Pharma Bro” convicted of securities fraud.

JPMorgan paid Javice $US21 million for her equity stake in Frank and the promise of an additional $US20 million retention bonus. She was also named a JPMorgan managing director at a salary of $US300,000. But the relationship soured quickly. Even before the bank discovered the allegedly fraudulent user data, it opened an internal investigation into allegations that Javice misused corporate credit cards for personal expenses and other violations of JPMorgan rules. She was fired in November 2022.

In a separate civil suit, Javice claimed the Frank acquisition was part of an “aggressive campaign” by JPMorgan to acquire fintech companies starting in 2020. Her legal team said that Dimon told Javice in July 2021 that he thought JPMorgan should “get the deal done.” At the time, a competitor later identified in court as Capital One was considering a transaction to land Frank.

Prosecutors say Javice and Amar created “the most explicitly fraudulent diligence documents” for use by Capital One, which they later provided to JPMorgan.

In addition to pointing the finger at JPMorgan, Amar may also be targeting his former boss. Last month, Javice claimed Amar plans to try to save himself by arguing to jurors that she “concealed information and deceived him.” The defence is turning Amar into a “second prosecutor,” Javice argued. The judge denied her request for separate trials.

JPMorgan quietly fired Javice and Amar in late 2022 after placing them on administrative leave earlier in the year. Any hopes of that being the end of it evaporated when Javice sued JPMorgan, alleging it launched an internal investigation of the Frank deal as pretext to fire her and deny her the $US20 million bonus.

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The bank responded with a suit of its own, claiming Javice and Amar defrauded it by vastly inflating the number of customers Frank had. A few months later, Javice was arrested at Newark Liberty International Airport and charged with defrauding JPMorgan. The verdict in the criminal trial could decide some of the central issues in those cases.

Prosecutors have provided the defendants with a list of 26 witnesses they may call to the stand, though their identities haven’t been made public. Jurors are expected to hear from as many as eight JPMorgan witnesses and at least one from LionTree, which advised Frank on the transaction.

The trial may also feature testimony from Frank’s former director of engineering, who allegedly refused to help Javice falsify user data and later recorded calls with her and Amar.

Jurors will be shown a small fraction of the more than one million pages turned over to the government by JPMorgan in response to grand jury subpoenas, including Slack chat exchanges, texts and emails involving Javice and Amar.

Bloomberg

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