Charlie Javice, founder of a startup acquired by JPMorgan Chase in 2021 for $175 million, was sentenced to just more than seven years in prison Monday for defrauding the bank by overstating how many customers the fintech firm had, Reuters reported.

In March, a 12-person jury found Javice and her chief growth officer Olivier Amar guilty on three counts of fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit fraud. Prosecutors had sought a sentence of 12 years.

Javice, 33, cried as she delivered an emotional statement to the court Monday. Standing to address the judge, Javice said she felt profound remorse for her actions and asked for forgiveness from JPMorgan, employees of the startup, shareholders and investors.

At one point, Javice turned and directly addressed her family, sitting in the front row, to apologize and thank them for what she called unwavering support.

“I will spend my entire life regretting these errors,” Javice said.

“I’m asking with all of my heart for forgiveness,” she said. “I ask your Honor to temper justice with mercy … I will accept your judgment with dignity and humility.”

JPMorgan bought the startup, called Frank, to help the biggest U.S. bank by assets market its financial products to students. Frank was a digital platform that helped students apply for financial aid. In September 2021, JPMorgan told CNBC in an exclusive interview on the deal that the fintech firm had served more than five million students since Javice founded it.

But months after the deal closed, JPMorgan discovered that Frank had fewer than 300,000 real customers; the rest were synthetic identities created by Javice with the help of a data scientist.

Javice was arrested in 2023 on charges that she defrauded JPMorgan in the deal. Details that emerged later showed that Frank employees expressed disbelief when Javice directed them to boost their customer roster before the acquisition.

The week before selling her company to JPMorgan, Javice directed an employee to fabricate millions of users. When the employee declined, Javice reassured him, according to testimony given earlier this year.

“She said: ‘Don’t worry. I don’t want to end up in an orange jumpsuit,'” the employee testified.

Caroline Ellison, the star witness in the prosecution of her former boyfriend, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, was sentenced Tuesday in New York federal court to two years in prison and ordered to forfeit $11 billion for her role in the massive fraud and conspiracy that doomed the cryptocurrency exchange once valued at $32 billion.

The prison term was significantly stiffer than the recommendation by the federal Probation Department that Judge Lewis Kaplan sentence Ellison, who had run the hedge fund Alameda Research, to three years of supervised release, with no time at all behind bars. Defense lawyers also had requested a no-prison sentence for Ellison.

Alameda received much of the $8 billion in customer funds looted by Bankman-Fried from FTX. The stolen money was used for Alameda’s trading operation and other purposes.

While Kaplan praised Ellison for her extensive cooperation with prosecutors — which led to the conviction of Bankman-Fried — the judge said her criminal sentence needed to deter other potential bad actors from committing fraud.

The judge said the FTX case is probably the greatest financial fraud perpetrated in the history of the U.S., and because of that a “literal get-out-of-jail-free card I can’t agree to,” Kaplan said in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, where Ellison’s parents and two sisters looked on from the courtroom’s gallery.

“I’ve seen a lot of cooperators over the years and I’ve never seen one quite like Miss Ellison,” said Kaplan, who also said he believed that Ellison was genuinely remorseful for her crimes and that her cooperation carried a steep price for her emotionally.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon urged Kaplan for leniency, citing Ellison’s consistent truthfulness while refusing to minimize her role in the fraud. Sassoon also said she could not overstate Ellison’s assistance in convicting Bankman-Fried.

Ellison’s attorney, Anjan Sahni, urged Kaplan to give Ellison a second chance saying she has “recovered her moral compass” and “profoundly regrets” not leaving FTX and Bankman-Fried’s orbit.

Ellison read from a statement in a shaky voice while crying at times as she apologized to the people she had hurt and said she was deeply ashamed. She also said she was sorry for not being brave enough to walk away from FTX and Bankman-Fried.

Kaplan allowed Ellison to remain free on bail until she surrenders to prison either on or after Nov. 7.

Ellison reached a plea deal with prosecutors in December 2022, a month after FTX spiraled into bankruptcy. She pleaded guilty to conspiracy and financial fraud charges.

Bankman-Fried, in contrast, chose to stand trial and was convicted of all seven criminal fraud charges against him. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March and also was ordered to pay $11 billion in forfeiture by Kaplan.

Bankman-Fried since then has appealed his conviction, and requested a new trial and a different judge, arguing that Kaplan was biased against him.

Two other former FTX executives, Gary Wang and Nishad Singh, are scheduled to be sentenced later this year. Like Ellison, they pleaded guilty instead of standing trial.

On Tuesday, before sentencing Ellison, Kaplan noted that while the FTX founder had denied criminal conduct, she cooperated with authorities.

“It didn’t work out so well” for Bankman-Fried, in part because of Ellison’s cooperation, the judge said.

Kaplan credited Ellison for providing prosecutors with seven fake spreadsheets, which he called “one of the huge pieces of evidence in the case” against Bankman-Fried.

Late Monday, Ellison’s attorneys in a court filing said they had finalized financial settlements with prosecutors and the FTX debtor’s estate.

The filing did not say how much she would pay in those settlements, which are separate from the forfeiture order, but it was already known that Ellison’s $10 million in shares in the AI startup Anthropic, which have grown substantially since she first bought them, provide the bulk value of her settlements.

Both Bankman-Fried and Ellison had faced the same statutory maximum sentence of about 110 years in prison for their crimes.

Defendants in criminal cases who cooperate with prosecutors instead of fighting the charges, particularly in white-collar cases such as FTX, often receive leniency when they are sentenced.

WATCH: FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried appeals fraud conviction

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Thursday for the massive fraud and conspiracy that doomed his cryptocurrency exchange and a related hedge fund.

“They built something really beautiful and I threw all of that away,” Bankman-Fried said of his co-workers at FTX. “It haunts me every day.”

“It’s been excruciating to watch this all unfold,” he said. “Customers don’t deserve this level of pain.

“I was the CEO of FTX and I was responsible.”

SBF faced a maximum possible sentence of 110 years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines for the massive fraud conspiracy that led to the collapse of FTX and a related hedge fund, a judge ruled Thursday.

Judge Lewis Kaplan increased the sentencing guidelines range for Bankman-Fried after finding that he had perjured himself at his trial and knowingly obstructed justice.

The judge also found Thursday that the total loss of the fraud at FTX exceeded $550 million. Anything more than that is “just gravy,” Kaplan noted, referring to the fact that any more loss would not increase the top end of the guidelines.

However, Kaplan said he “rejects the entirety of defendant’s argument there was no loss” at FTX, calling that claim “misleading, logically flawed and speculative.”

After Kaplan ruled on the guideline enhancement, several victims of Bankman-Fried began talking about the effects of his crimes.

Bankman-Fried, who was wearing a beige jailhouse jumpsuit, looked at the victims as they talked to the judge.

Federal prosecutors want Bankman-Fried sentenced to between 40 to 50 years in prison. His defense team asked Kaplan to sentence him to much less than that, between five and six-a-half years behind bars.

Kaplan presided over the trial, which ended in November when a jury found Bankman-Fried, 32, guilty of seven counts and held him responsible for the roughly $10 billion of customer deposits that went missing in 2022.

The charges included wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud against FTX customers and against lenders to sister hedge fund Alameda Research; conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit commodities fraud against FTX investors; and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Bankman-Fried’s parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, are in the courtroom for the sentencing hearing.