о мoлодых и успешных, которые рано вставали, много работали и не боялись рисковать
КДПВ / TL;DR[via Linas Beliūnas @LinkedIn] Forbes 30 Under 30 is the biggest scam in the media while this has to be the craziest fraud in FinTech after FTX.
Financial Technology startup Frank was founded in 2016 as a financial platform that helps college students manage their financial aid and student debt. Frank founder Charlie Javice had a lofty goal to build the startup into “an Amazon for higher education”.
A proud member of the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, Javice once said that her biggest challenge at Frank was scale. So she made it up!
She first asked a top engineer at Frank to create the fake customer list. When he refused, Javice approached a data science professor to help. Using data from some individuals who'd already started using Frank, he created 4 million fake customer accounts-for which Javice paid him $18,000.
This looked like a rocketiship, so banking giant JPMorgan Chase & Co. rushed to acquire it. Turns out, they paid $175 million for a lie.
The bank first noticed irregularities with the list when a JPM employee observed that the list contained exactly 1,048,576 rows, the maximum allowed by Microsoft Excel (*).
But they really found out the customers were manufactured after the bank spammed the 4 million fake accounts with cross-marketing opportunities and nearly all bounced back.
JPMorgan Chase is now shutting the site down and suing the 30-year-old founder of Frank.
Does anyone remember when due diligence was still a thing?[*] Отдельно доставляет, что сгенерировавший фейковые аккаунты "data science professor" сделал это, судя по всему, в Экселе.