The largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase & Co., is accusing young Jewish entrepreneur Charlie Javis of defrauding millions of potential customers into buying his company for $175 million.
In a lawsuit filed by the bank last month, it accused the once-promising CEO on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list of inflating the client list of his college financial planning startup, Frank, which was acquired by JPMorgan in September. had bought. 2021.
The bank accused Olivier Amar, former chief development and acquisitions officer at Javis & Frank, of defrauding nearly four million customers and creating millions of fake profiles on the platform, hiring a data science professional to hide his actions.
“To cash in, Javis decided to lie, including lies about Frank’s success, Frank’s size, and the depth of Frank’s market penetration,” the suit read.
In turn, Javis’s attorneys have denied the allegations against their client and have filed a lawsuit against JPMorgan for allegedly trying to avoid paying him.
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The now 30-year-old founded Frank in 2016, when she was just 24. With a stated goal of helping college students fill out financial aid forms and save billions of dollars in tuition, Frank and its young founder captured the world’s attention.
But according to JPMorgan, it was mostly a hoax, or at least an exaggerated success story. The bank that Frank claimed to have 4.25 million college students as customers by the end of 2021 instead never had more than 250,000.
According to a New York Times report, despite repeated warning signs, Javis continued to enjoy sympathetic coverage from major news outlets including Forbes, Fast Company Magazine, Medium, and Insider.

It was noticed by the US Department of Education soon after Frank was founded. In its early days, the company offered financial assistance to college students for their tuition on a website called frankfafsa.com.
FAFSA stands for Free Application for Federal Student Aid and is a registered trademark that was used by Frank without permission, the department said at the time. As part of a settlement agreement reached in 2018, Frank handed over the web address to the department and switched to an alternate web address.
Around the same time, Adi Omesi, an Israeli co-founder of Frank, sued Javis for wage theft in Israel and received compensation.
But this did not stop his overwhelmingly positive media coverage.
In 2018, Business Insider ran an article titled: “A 26-year-old founder has a solution to what Bill Gates calls an ‘unnecessary roadblock’ in college – and his startup is helping students get around thousands of tuition fees.”
In the article, Javis claimed that Frank saved its users an average of $28,000 on tuition.
However, in an article published by the outlet after JPMorgan’s lawsuit against Javis, it cited student-aid expert Mark Kantrowitz as saying that Frank was simply simplifying the process for students to fill out the FAFSA form.
Kantrowitz told Insider, “Frank did nothing that would have affected the amount of aid the students would have received if they had filed the FAFSA.” “This does not double the amount of financial aid.”
He added that Frank was making up figures “at random” when describing the amount of help his users had received.
Joyce’s close relationship with the media began in 2011, when she appeared on Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People of 2011 list for her role in an earlier startup she founded called PowerUp.
Founded as a non-profit, PowerUp’s stated goal was to provide loans to entrepreneurs in poor countries and help lift them out of poverty using small contributions made by college students.
But an internal investigation found no evidence that PowerUp was registered as a nonprofit. The outlet cited a former board member of the company as saying it never gained much traction, contradicting Joyce, which said in 2013 that the company had raised $300,000 in debt.
Javis soon abandoned the idea and went on to found Tapd, a company that sought to connect young professionals to job opportunities via text messages.
The company was later rebranded as Frank’s after financial difficulties, which at one point forced Javis to fire his entire team. Still, Javis characterized the challenges as a teaching moment and framed it as part of his eventual success story.
In an email addressed to an online magazine in 2020 and obtained by Insider, Frank’s public relations representative described Frank’s story as “miraculous” and said that Javis’s “first company failed after 18 months” and that he is still “persuading I succeeded. [investors] to fund his next company, Frank.

The post Young Jewish Entrepreneur Accused of Defrauding America’s Largest Bank first appeared on Kevin J Palmer Scottsdale.

The Americas, already had hundreds of indigenous nations that had occupied the continent for tens of thousands of years before the Europeans landed. They had large cities and the people were highly skilled in astronomy, geography and math.

Rationalized through a single god chosen by a single people, Manifest Destiny evolved, leading to the largest holocausts known to mankind. This self-empowered doctrine gave Europeans their right to discover and conquer land in the name of their Old Testament God. The rational was used to “civilize the new world” and wipe out whole cultures along with 70 to 100 million people.

Before Europeans, Native Americans found an advanced spiritual balance with Nature, Earth and Sky using many practitioners, similar to the ancient east. It seems inconceivable that one written document and its God could be used to lay so much to waste.

#moonlightmilemagazine #kevinjpalmer #boyscout #rock&roll #takingabreath #blastfromthepast #memoriesofmusic #radiopictureproductions

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Jeff Bezos: People who are ‘right a lot’ make decisions differently than everyone else—here’s how

We often view the most powerful leaders as being decisive, continual and unwavering. We admire and celebrate them.

A number of studies have even echoed this very same idea. In his body of research, Jim Collins, lecturer and author of “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t,” found that a common quality among great leaders is speed and decisiveness.

But Jeff Bezos, who announced Tuesday that he will step down from his role as Amazon CEO in late 2021 and transition to the role of executive chair, sees things a little differently.

Consistency of thought isn’t a positive trait

In a blog post from 2012, Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp and co-author of the New York Times best-selling book “Rework,” recounts a time when Bezos stopped by the company’s headquarters and did a 45-minute Q&A session. In one of his answers, the Amazon founder shared an interesting insight about people who are “right a lot.”

According to Fried, ”[Bezos] said people who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds […]. It’s perfectly healthy — encouraged, even — to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today.”

Jeff Bezos’ wife would rather have a child with 9 fingers than one without this skill

Bezos went on to explain that the smartest people he’s observed were always “revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved. They’re open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking,” Fried recalls.

In short, smart people (a.k.a. those who are “right a lot”), change their minds — a lot.

Nothing is definite

When asked what trait signified someone who was “wrong a lot” of the time, Fried says Bezos’ answer was “the tendency to be obsessed with details that only support one point of view. If someone can’t climb out of the details, and see the bigger picture from multiple angles, they’re often wrong most of the time.”

It’s important to note that Bezos isn’t implying that smart people are insecure about their decisions. He’s simply saying that they’re comfortable with being wrong, which then allows them to analyze new data, be open to new opinions and revisit long-standing positions.

As psychologist Mel Schwartz writes, “One of the most prevalent — and damaging — themes in our culture is the need to be right. It is so deeply embedded in our belief system and in our collective psyche that we never even pause to consider it.”

It’s not just Bezos

At a D10 conference in 2012, Tim Cook shared a number of lessons he learned from Steve Jobs. What impressed the Apple CEO the most was Jobs’ ability to change his mind, quickly and often.

“Steve would flip on something so fast that you would forget that he was the one taking the 180-degree polar opposite position the day before,” he told the audience. “I saw it daily. This is a gift, because things do change, and it takes courage to change. It takes courage to say, ‘I was wrong.’ I think he had that.”

Al Pittampalli, author of “Persuadable: How Great Leaders Change Their Minds to Change the World,” is a consultant who has worked with leaders at NASA, Boeing and IBM. In an interview with Canadian Business, he argues that the smartest people “don’t wait for that negative feedback to come to them, they hurry up and try to actually say, ‘If I need to change my mind, I might as well do it sooner rather than later.’”

So the next time you make a decision, remember that it’s okay to be a little “wishy-washy.” The goal is to get it right. You can still take bold stances and hold strong opinions, but know that they can be temporary. That’s the best way to ensure, as often as possible, that you’ll actually get it right.

Published Tue, Mar 12 201910:31 AM EDTUpdated Tue, Feb 2 20214:46 PM EST Jeff Haden

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