Forbes is a well-known financial news publication that releases a “30 Under 30” list annually to recognize individuals under 30 who have made significant achievements in the entrepreneurial space. Over the years, however, a dark side to the list has emerged. Some 30 Under 30 alumni have been accused of impropriety, while others have been convicted of fraud and even landed in prison.
Here are five of Forbes’ picks from its 30 Under 30 lists who were later convicted of crimes. Four of them were sent to prison. Two of these white-collar criminals boasted elite educational backgrounds: One attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while another graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Even Forbes acknowledged its miscues and placed these malfeasants into a separate “Hall of Shame.”
These are five of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 picks who went on to commit fraud, with some facing prison sentences.
Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and chief executive officer of FTX Cryptocurrency Derivatives Exchange, speaks during the Bloomberg Crypto Summit in 2022.Photo by Bloomberg on Getty Images ·Photo by Bloomberg on Getty Images
Sam Bankman-Fried was on Forbes’ 2021 30 Under 30 list in the finance category. Bankman-Fried, simply known by his initials SBF at the time, founded cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2019, when he was 27 years old. Cryptocurrency was gaining traction as an alternative asset in the 2010s, and by the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit, crypto investment had reached a fever pitch. FTX had a peak valuation of $32 billion before its spectacular collapse over 10 days in November 2022, just prior to a planned takeover by Binance, amid accusations of mishandling customer funds.
After a month-long trial, the Department of Justice found Bankman-Fried guilty on several counts of fraud, including conspiracy to commit money laundering, and described his actions as one of the largest financial frauds in history. In all, he stole more than $8 billion of his customers’ money.
From 2019 to 2022, Bankman-Fried was “the leader and mastermind of a scheme to defraud customers of FTX by misappropriating billions of dollars of those customers’ funds,” according to the DOJ. The Justice Department found that “Bankman-Fried took FTX customer funds for his personal use, to make investments and millions of dollars of political contributions to candidates from both parties, and to repay billions of dollars in loans owed by Alameda Research,” a cryptocurrency trading fund that he also founded.
Bankman-Fried also defrauded lenders to Alameda and equity investors in FTX by providing them with false and misleading financial information that concealed his misuse of customer deposits.
In September 2024, Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to pay $11 billion in forfeiture.
Charlie Javice, founder of Frank, arrives at federal court in 2023. Photo by Bloomberg on Getty Images ·Photo by Bloomberg on Getty Images
Charlie Javice was on the Forbes’ 2019 30 Under 30 list in the finance category. She was around 23 years old at the time she founded Frank in 2016, and in three years, it raised $16 million. The start-up’s software aimed to make the application process for student loans via the federal government’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) faster and easier.
In 2021, Javice tried to sell Frank to two major banks with claims that it had 4.25 million users, but in fact, it only had 300,000 real users, according to the Department of Justice.
JPMorgan Chase expressed interest in purchasing Frank, but first, the bank wanted to verify the number of users. Javice fabricated a data set that listed 4.25 million Frank users, so JPMorgan went ahead with the purchase, buying Frank for $175 million.
The DOJ said that at or about the same time that Javice was creating the fabricated data set, Javice and Franck’s chief growth officer, Olivier Amar, attempted to purchase, in the open market, real data on college students to cover up their misrepresentations. The pair succeeded in buying data on 4.5 million students for $105,000, but the set contained missing data fields.
JPMorgan sought to start a marketing campaign to those users, but the DOJ asserted that “Javice fraudulently provided the data she and Amar had purchased on the open market, at a small fraction of the price that JPMC paid to acquire Frank and its purported users.”
In September 2025, Javice and Amar were convicted of conspiracy, wire fraud, bank fraud, and securities fraud. Javice was sentenced to 85 months in prison and ordered to pay more than $300 million.
Martin Shkreli, former chief executive officer of Turing Pharmaceuticals AG, exits federal court in 2017. Photo by Bloomberg on Getty Images ·Photo by Bloomberg on Getty Images
Martin Shkreli was on Forbes’ 2013 30 Under 30 list in the finance category. In its early 2013 description of Shkreli, who was 29 at the time, Forbes described him as an activist hedge fund manager specializing in healthcare stocks. His latest initiative at the time was founding a biotech focused on rare diseases. The “Pharma Bro,” as he was known at the time, gained notoriety in 2015 for buying the rights to Daraprim, a life-saving anti-malarial drug. He immediately raised the price by 4,000% and tried to illegally block drugmakers from producing a cheaper version.
Shkreli’s case for criminality stemmed from his involvement as the founder and managing member of hedge funds MSMB Capital Management (which he started in 2009) and MSMB Healthcare Management and as the former CEO of Retrophin, a publicly traded biopharmaceutical company. After a six-week trial in 2017, he was found guilty on two counts of securities fraud and one count of securities fraud conspiracy, in which one U.S. attorney called Shkreli’s actions a “Ponzi scheme.”
In one of the DOJ’s felony charges, Shkreli was said to have used false representations and omissions to convince investors to pour more than $3 million into MSMB Capital between 2009 and 2014. To cover trading losses, Shkreli sent fabricated performance updates to investors, ”boasting that the fund had made big profits when, in fact, it had sustained substantial losses,” according to the DOJ. In another charge, the Justice Department found that Shkreli participated in “a scheme to defraud investors and potential investors in Retrophin by attempting to illegally control the price and trading volume of Retrophin’s stock.”
In 2018, Shkreli was sentenced to 7 years in prison and ordered to pay a $75,000 fine and $7.3 million in forfeiture. In turn, substitute assets seized by the government for forfeiture included the one-off album by the Wu Tang Clan, Once Upon A Time in Shaolin, which later sold for $4 million.
Shkreli was released early in May 2022. A probation report in 2023 stated that he was living with his sister in Queens and was earning $2,500 a month as a consultant for a law firm, but he was struggling with his mental health.
Nate Paul, born Natin Paul, was on Forbes’ 2016 30 Under 30 list in the finance category, aged 28 at the time of his recognition. He served as CEO of World Class Capital Group, a real estate investment firm with a $1 billion portfolio of office buildings, retail centers, apartments, and student housing in 17 states, according to Forbes.
In 2019, the FBI raided his office, but it would take a few years for federal prosecutors to charge Paul with various counts of wire fraud in 2023. He allegedly made “false statements for the purpose of influencing the actions of financial institutions on applications for loans” in 2017 and 2018—reportedly amounting to $172 million in loans for property ventures. He was also accused of inflating his assets and understating his liabilities to secure those loans, and if found guilty, a conviction would have led to as long as 30 years in prison. In 2025, Paul took a guilty plea on one count, but the other 11 charges were dropped. He faced no prison time but was ordered to pay a $1 million fine.
Company histories:
Obinwanne Okeke wasn’t on Forbes’ primary 30 Under 30 list, but he was part of Forbes Africa’s 30 Under 30 for 2016. Okeke, probably 28 at the time of the list’s release, was the founder of the Invictus Group, which operated in Nigeria and other countries. Its businesses were in construction, agriculture, oil and gas, telecommunications, and real estate.
In 2020, the Department of Justice accused Okeke and other conspirators of stealing login credentials from an executive at Unatrac Holding Limited, which was the export sales office for Caterpillar heavy industrial and farm equipment, through email phishing in 2018. The conspirators sent fraudulent wire transfer requests and attached fake invoices, totaling almost $11 million, which was transferred overseas, according to the DOJ.
In 2021, Okeke was sentenced to 10 years in prison. However, a report by The Cable, an online newspaper from Nigeria, said that he was released in December 2025.
While these individuals didn’t make Forbes’ 30 Under 30 lists, they were both well-known young entrepreneurs who were later convicted of fraud.
Ulbricht created Silk Road, a dark web marketplace where individuals could conduct illegal transactions using cryptocurrencies to buy and sell drugs, stolen credit card numbers, and other contraband. The Department of Justice charged Ulbricht for creating and operating the website, which boasted over 100,000 users at its peak, to buy and sell over $200 million worth of illegal drugs and other unlawful goods and services.
Holmes, a Stanford University dropout, founded Theranos, a blood-testing company. But the Department of Justice accused her of defrauding investors to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, claiming she developed a revolutionary blood analyzer device that turned out to be fake.
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