[mostlystatic]

You pay extra to hide the crime:

""" After the August 3, 2021 Zoom meeting, the Data Science Professor returned a signed version of Frank’s NDA. The Data Science Professor’s usual hourly rate was $300. Javice unilaterally doubled the Data Science Professor’s rate to $600.

[...]

Specifically, on August 5, 2021 at 11:05 a.m., the Data Science Professor provided Javice an invoice for $13,300, documenting 22.17 hours of work over just three days. The invoice entries show that the bulk of his time was spent on the main task that Javice retained the Data Science Professor to perform – making up customer data. The Data Science Professor’s invoice indicated that he performed “college major generation” and “generation of all features except for the financials” while creating “first names, last names, emails, phone numbers” and “looking into whitepages.”

In response to the initial invoice, Javice demanded that he remove all the details admitting to how they had created fake customers – and added a $4,700 bonus. In an email to the Data Science Professor at 12:39 p.m. on August 5, 2021, Javice wrote: “send the invoice back at $18k and just one line item for data analysis.” In total, Javice paid the Data Science Professor over $800 per hour for his work creating the Fake Customer List, which is 270% of his usual hourly rate.

The Data Science Professor provided Javice the revised invoice via email seven minutes later at 12:46 p.m., commenting “Wow. Thank you. Here is the new invoice.” """

https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/rNlNVTl....

[yowzadave]

I wonder why the Data Science Professor isn't named/charged as an accomplice. Maybe they are acting as a witness for the prosecution?

[skeeter2020]

it sounds like his initial invoice was quite clear in the work completed, then updated at the client's request. So while you can argue moral grounds for not doing this work, I don't think there's illegality, i.e. conspiracy.

[pciexpgpu]

I mean if you are a professor and knowledgeable in how the startup uses the data, it’s hardly justifiable that “oh crap i didn’t know they were using it for illegal purposes”.

They were totally complicit allegedly.

[romellem]

This is spoken to [in the full complaint][1]. The data scientist was told Frank really did have 4 million users, and the scientist only needed to generate this "synthetic data" as a way to "anonymize" their "real" data. I.e. the scientist was duped:

  JAVICE told Scientist-1 [...] that she had a database of approximately 4 million
  people and wanted to create a database of anonymized data that mirrored the
  statistical properties of the original database (the “Synthetic Data Set”).
  
  [After JAVICE sends Scientist-1 the data], Scientist-1 understood that the data
  available via the Access Link Email -
  **a data set of approximately 142,000 people** (emphasis added) -
  was a random sample of a larger database which contained data for approximately
  4 million people. In fact, that data represented every Frank user who had at
  least started a FAFSA.

[1]: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1577861...

[my_usernam3]

Plausible deniability is my non professional guess