> What was the end game here? Is there any universe where someone does something like this and gets away with it?

The Frank founder went to work for them after this closed. It doesn't look like she thought she did anything wrong here otherwise you'd think she'd get as far away from the mark as possible.

When fake it until you make it and hustle culture goes horribly wrong.

Previous reporting on this (when the JPM civil suit was filed) mentioned that JPM didn't care about the fafsa forms business at all. They bought them entirely to get a big pile of marketing leads to sign up young people for banking services early in their adult life before they're signed up with other banks, through a brand they're already familiar with. Considering how many "$200 to open a new checking account!!" junk mail fliers Chase sends me, $41/lead must've seemed like a bargain.

She probably thought they would just be subsumed into a massive corporation, that JPM had shitty metrics and monitoring on their marketing campaign, and nobody would notice most of their emails were going nowhere.

People get away with lesser versions of this type of scam all the time. Buyers don't want the bad publicity so if the loss isn't material then they just write it off and salvage whatever value they can find. You hear rumors about this kind of stuff that never shows up in the news, and when large companies buy startups it's even kind of expected that the financials are at least a little bit fake. This case was particularly egregious because the loss was material enough that even JPMorgan would have to publicly disclose it rather than sweeping it under the rug.

The irony of this is if you google "JPMorgan indictment" you will find lots of criminals, getting away with it all the time.