NEW YORK (AP) — A prosecutor argued that a Florida woman executed a ‘brazen fraud’ by exaggerating her student aid startup’s customer base to sell it to JPMorgan Chase & Co. for $175 million. During closing arguments in the criminal trial, Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicholas Chiuchiolo urged the Manhattan federal court jury to convict Charlie Javice and another former top executive of conspiracy and fraud charges. Defense attorney Jose Baez countered, calling the evidence “incredibly flawed” and asking the jury to acquit Javice, who appeared on Forbes’ 2019 “30 Under 30” list. Prosecutors alleged that Javice claimed her company had over 4.25 million clients when it actually had around 400,000. When JPMorgan sought to verify the client list, Javice allegedly attempted to create synthetic data to inflate the numbers. Eventually, she hired an outside data scientist for $105,000 to produce a synthetic dataset showing over 4.2 million students. Javice did not testify during the five-week trial, and the jury was expected to begin deliberations on Thursday.
— news from The Associated Press
