Closing arguments began Wednesday morning and stretched into the early evening in the Charlie Javice fraud trial in New York — with one word playing 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.
“Charlie Javice and Olivier Amar sold Frank for $175 million worth of lies,” prosecutor Nicholas Chiuchiolo told jurors, beginning his closing argument against the website founder and her lieutenant-turned-codefendant.
The pair consistently assured JPMorgan “that Frank had over 4 million users and that a user was someone who’d started an account by providing their first name, last name, phone number, and email,” Chiuchiolo said.
These users never existed, the prosecutor told jurors. At most, the website had collected names, phone numbers, and emails for 300,000, the prosecutor said.
Instead, Javice and Amar “generated fake data for 4 million people who did not exist” and passed it off to the bank as real to clinch the deal and become multi-millionaires, he said. “The names, phone numbers, emails? All were fake.”
Users meant future bank customers, prosecutors say
Prosecutors say Javice tricked bank executives into thinking that if they purchased Frank, they would become the new owners of the names, emails, and addresses of all 4 million of these Frank users, all of whom had used the site to at least begin filing out a federal financial aid form.
They were “at the start of their financial journeys,” the prosecutor said. JPMorgan could use Frank’s data — those names and other contact information — to reach these “users” directly, selling them their very first checking accounts, credit cards, and car loans.
In five weeks of testimony, and in closing arguments Wednesday, lawyers for Javice 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.
There’s no way the nation’s largest bank would have ever believed that four million people had created Frank website accounts and begun filling out federal financial aid forms, Javice’s lead defense lawyer, Jose Baez, told jurors.
“If 4.25 million people went to that website, there’s no way they all filled out FAFSAs,” Baez said, referring to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid filled out by 17 million students a year.
“I’m going to tell you straight up — they knew,” Baez said of the bank, which he said had conducted its own investigation into Frank. “They knew exactly what they were buying,” he said.
“‘User’ means many things, including a website visitor,” read a slide used in closing arguments for Amar. His defense lawyer, Matthew I. Menchel, complained to jurors that prosecutors are unfairly trying to “lump together” Amar and Javice.
Amar was out of the loop for what prosecutors are calling key moments in their alleged conspiracy and actually urged that some incorrect traffic statistics be corrected during negotiations, the lawyer argued.
“That’s inconsistent with someone who is trying to defraud somebody, and it’s inconsistent with their working together,” Menchel told jurors.
JPMorgan wanted Javice, not her data
Throughout five weeks of testimony, Javice’s defense lawyers have pushed the theory that she was a young and promising microfinance star. The bank wanted her, not her data, and only cried “fraud” months later out of buyer’s remorse, Baez told jurors Wednesday.
Baez, who delivered closing statements as lead lawyer in the acquittal of Casey Anthony, frequently used humor to convince jurors it was laughable to think JPMorgan Chase was ever bamboozled.
“Somebody robbed the bank!” he mocked, of the bank’s reaction in firing Javice and shuttering Frank a year after the merger. “It was Charlie the Kid!”
At another point, Baez joked that to JPMorgan, $175 million was “Not a lot of money at all. This was Monopoly money.”
And who was the banker the Monopoly game was based on, he asked hypothetically, answering his own question to laughter in the courtroom: “JPMorgan himself.”
The definition of ‘user’
A central dispute in front of jurors — as they listened to closing arguments by attorneys for the government, for Javice, and for her co-defendant — is 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 executives 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.
The judge limited closing arguments to two hours per side.
The government presented its arguments first, followed by Javice’s. After lunch, jurors heard arguments on behalf of Amar, followed by a brief rebuttal statement by the government.
The two co-defendants are charged with conspiracy to commit wire and bank fraud, along with separate counts of wire, bank, and securities fraud. They face potential maximum sentences of 30 years in prison.
March 26, 2025: This story was updated throughout the day on Wednesday to include details from daylong closing arguments.
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