Apparently, Javice first sent her Director of Engineering an email with a link to an article titled “Generating Tabular Synthetic Data Using GANs.” The article notes that “[t]he goal is to generate synthetic data that is similar to the actual data in terms of statistics and demographics.” (View Highlight)
The Director wasn’t impressed. He asked if it was even legal to do this. Now you can imagine that Javice’s response would’ve been in the affirmative. She even said that it was standard practice during investments and that no one would end up in an ‘orange jumpsuit’ (meaning prison time) over this. (View Highlight)
Her colleague and Chief Growth Officer Olivier Amar jumped in. He reached out to a company called ASL Marketing, Inc. A firm that claimed to have “the most comprehensive, accurate and responsive data of high school students, college students and young adults available anywhere.” It could give Frank exactly what it needed! (View Highlight)
So Amar paid ASL $105,000. And bought a list of 4.5 million students. (View Highlight)
He then tapped another company called Enformion for the email addresses of students who were part of ASL’s list. And paid them $70,000 for their troubles. (View Highlight)
So, Javice asked the Professor to generate addresses for the fake students. And the Data Science Professor emailed Javice asking, “I can’t seem to find addresses in my raw files … Should I attempt to fabricate them?” (View Highlight)
Javice responded saying, “I just wouldn’t want the street to not exist in the state.” Basically, the addresses could be fake. But she didn’t want a non-existent XYZ street name to pop up. It had to be real. (View Highlight)
So Javice had a brainwave. She figured out that, “[I]f we can’t do real addresses whats the best we can do for that? Worse comes to wors[t] we can try a unique ID.” (View Highlight)
Basically, she fooled JPMorgan by convincing them that the Unique ID in the list was to protect the confidentiality of the student users. That the Unique ID was tied to real addresses in the back end. And the bank believed her. (View Highlight)
When the Professor sent Javice a bill of $13,300 for the work done, he was quite elaborate. He described that he’d performed “college major generation” that included creating “first names, last names, emails, phone numbers”. (View Highlight)
