Closing arguments in the Charlie Javice fraud trial are scheduled for all day Wednesday in New York.
Prosecutors allege that Javice tricked JPMorgan Chase into buying her financial aid website, Frank, for $175M.
The US says she falsely claimed to have marketing data for more than 4 million Frank account holders.
Daylong closing arguments are scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. Wednesday in the Charlie Javice fraud trial in New York — and one word will likely play a starring role.
That pivotal word is “user.”
Federal prosecutors say that almost four years ago, Javice defrauded the nation’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, out of $175 million, the price the bank paid for her financial aid website, Frank.
In the indictment, prosecutors alleged that Javice tricked bank executives into thinking that if they purchased Frank, they would become the new owners of the names, emails, and addresses of more than 4 million Frank users. These users were students at the start of their financial journeys, to whom JPMorgan could market checking accounts and credit cards.
In five weeks of testimony, lawyers for Javice have sought to show that this is not what she had meant by users at all.
Instead, her lawyers say, she told the bank that 4 million people had merely visited the website and clicked around a bit, a number supported by Google Analytics.
Frank only ever collected personal identifying data for 300,000 account holders, not 4 million, both sides agree — a fact the bank says they only discovered months after the merger.
So a central dispute in front of jurors — as they listen to closing arguments by attorneys for the government, for Javice, and for her top lieutenant-turned-co-defendant Olivier Amar — will be this: How did Javice, 32, and Amar, 50, define “user” in negotiations with JPMorgan? As a nameless clicker? Or as a potential Chase customer whom the bank could email and text?
US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein raised this question in court on Tuesday as part of his preparation for instructing the jury on the law before deliberations.
“What about the argument that by telling Chase that ‘We have 4.25 million users,’ that they were telling the truth?” he asked Georgia Kostopoulos, an assistant US attorney.
“It was a lie,” the prosecutor quickly answered.
“But we have a number exactly the same as the number of users that visited the website,” the judge pushed, referring to the Google Analytics total. “And they’re called users.”
Kostopoulos countered that both Javice and Amar were present at a July 21, 2021, meeting where Javice assured JPMorgan Chase that a user was someone who had provided Frank with their name and other personal identifying information as part of signing up for a website account.
