Forbes Frauds, Gassing Up, and Crime Bonnie 😶‍🌫️

Discord recently acquired the popular teenage app called Gas.

Here’s what the app is about. 

The poll-based app allows friends to share compliments with each other. The app is designed for anonymous compliments and positive affirmations or, as kids say, gassing your friends up. 😶‍🌫️

Gas has polls that ask users to vote for things like the most beautiful person they’ve met or the classmate that isn’t afraid to get in trouble. 

Basically an app to promote positive words and kindness. 🌈

Some Facts: 

• Gas was created by one of the co-creators of TBH, a very similar teenager app acquired and shut down by Facebook.
• It has soared in popularity among high schoolers since launching in August. It had more than 1 million daily active users and 30,000 new users per hour in October. This, despite the fact, that it has only four employees. 
• The Wall Street Journal previously named Gas the “hottest app right now” in October after it toppled TikTok and other popular social apps in Apple’s App Store charts.

You’d think that somebody who allegedly laundered billions of dollars would try to keep a low profile.

Instead, Heather started rapping all over social media under the alter-ego Razzlekhan.

In one memorable music video, she gallivants through Wall Street in John Lennon sunglasses and a leopard-print scarf, ready for a fight. To think that those music videos might’ve been funded by freshly laundered crypto credit.

Here's a piece of Heather's rap: 

Some Interesting Facts: 

• She has declared herself the “Crocodile of Wall Street.” 🐊
• Vanity Fair has billed her as one-half of crypto's Bonnie and Clyde.
• The couple has a Bengal cat named Clarissa (who had her own Instagram account). 🐈‍⬛
• In 2019, they had taken a trip to Ukraine to plan a life there. On the trip, according to federal prosecutors, they procured numerous packages from the dark web containing fake Ukrainian passports, SIM cards, and details for surreptitious bank accounts.
• Heather has now landed a job with a tech company in New York, even though she is currently on house arrest. 

JPMorgan Chase recently shut down the website for Frank - a college financial aid startup - it bought for $175 million in September 2021. 

At the time of purchase, JPMorgan touted Frank as the “fastest-growing college financial planning platform used by more than 5 million students at 6,000 institutions.”

Months after the transaction closed, JPMorgan realised how founder Charlie Javice had tricked the company into buying the startup.

Here’s what happened:

Chase sent out marketing emails to a batch of 400,000 Frank customers. About 70% of the emails bounced back. 

It seems Javice had lied to the bank about her startup’s scale. Of the total 5 million user base, nearly 4 million were fake customer accounts. So instead of gaining a business with millions of students, Chase had one with “fewer than 300,000.” ⬇️

Now Chase is not a novice company that would invest in just any startup without running backgrounds and financials. So how did it not realise the colossal fraud? 🤔

The Frank episode puts JPMorgan in hot soup. The fact that a young, 26-year-old founder with “fake it till you make it” ethos managed to allegedly dupe JPMorgan calls its judgement into question. ⁉️