Founder sentenced to seven years in prison for fraudulent sale to JPMorgan

Post by joshmn » Tue, Sep 30, 2025, 11:52 PM UTC

electroglyph wrote: post #196

joshmn wrote: post #159

Former federal inmate here who was recently released from prison a month ago today (I did 18 months): The big deal here was the loss amount, which can be construed any number of ways whether we like it or not. This will jack up the points and tilt the scale for the sentencing guidelines, and believe me they are archaic. After all is said and done, Charlie Javice will be hanging out at a prison camp—probably down ther…

did u transition out in corecivic?

Post by bruce511 » Wed, Oct 01, 2025, 12:51 AM UTC

atombender wrote: post #195

magicalhippo wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came up with a similarly impressive compression scheme as a young teen, shortly after I started programming. It was beautiful in its simplicity. Take 5 bytes, compute a 4-byte checksum, and just store the checksum. After all the chances of a checksum collision is miniscule. When decompressing just iterate over all 5-byte values until you get the correct checksum. The fantastic feature was of course that you could a…

I had another hairbrained idea once. Let's say you want to compress the number 5384615385. Find two numbers x and y so that x/y equals some number whose decimal part is 5384615385. In this case, that's 7/13. So the compressed output is just 7 and 13, which could be encoded very succinctly, thus saving lots of storage space; and decompression is just multiplying numbers. Unfortunately, while the idea works for some in…

Post by titanomachy » Wed, Oct 01, 2025, 1:03 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #175

randycupertino wrote: post #19

My favorite thing about this case is how she bragged to her lead engineer she wouldn't go to prison, "“Don’t worry — I don’t want to end up in an orange jumpsuit" when she was trying to convince the engineer to fabricate their user data. From the complaint: > In particular, CC-1 and JAVICE asked Engineer-1 to supplement a list of Frank’s website visitors with additional data fields containing synthetic data. > Engine…

This is why, as an engineer, it seems futile to make an ethical stand against something. They'll just find someone else to do it. Early in my career I was asked to write code to cheat a benchmark, essentially to make it seem our software performed better than it really did. I agonized over it because I was a junior developer just starting out my career, and eventually got the courage to tell my manager I wouldn't do…

Post by SoftTalker » Wed, Oct 01, 2025, 1:17 AM UTC

layman51 wrote: post #202

jerf wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way that due diligence would have discovered this was not to take the list and start doing spot checks on it. The way due diligence should have found this is that it should have been written all over the financials. What do you mean you have 4 million customers and a support staff of 20? What do you mean you have 4 million customers but your revenue is {clearly too low}? What do you mean you have 4 million custom…

Is it just me, but doesn't it seem like the concept of Frank as a business just sounds like it wouldn't have lived that long and that it might even be predatory? Frank got in trouble with the Department of Education because they used the term "FAFSA" in their domain name. I was lucky enough to have mentors in my life who warned me away from clicking on sponsored links to paid preparers if I ever decided to Google sea…

Post by jacquesm » Wed, Oct 01, 2025, 1:25 AM UTC

dreamcompiler wrote: post #216

jacquesm wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did DD on that for another group of investors and caused them to walk away. Interestingly, they too were scammers but of a completely different level. I think the 'inventor' (loose use of the term, nothing really got invented) was a true believer, he basically thought that if only he could get his hands on some capital that he would be able to make it work. He simply did not have the background required to see that…

I've occasionally been asked by an investor to do DD on some inventor's idea. Whenever it's an obvious scam I turn down the job. If I tell the truth and say it's a scam, the "inventor" will sue me. If I lie and say the technology has promise, the investor will sue me when he loses his investment. There's no upside to a job doing DD on a scam.