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Wells Fargo Fires 5,300 Employees For Creating Millions of Phony Accounts (cnn.com) 341

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNNMoney: Everyone hates paying bank fees. But imagine paying fees on a ghost account you didn't even sign up for. That's exactly what happened to Wells Fargo customers nationwide. On Thursday, federal regulators said Wells Fargo employees secretly created millions of unauthorized bank and credit card accounts -- without their customers knowing it -- since 2011. The phony accounts earned the bank unwarranted fees and allowed Wells Fargo employees to boost their sales figures and make more money. Wells Fargo confirmed to CNNMoney that it had fired 5,300 employees related to the shady behavior over the last few years. Employees went so far as to create phony PIN numbers and fake email addresses to enroll customers in online banking services, the CFPB said. The scope of the scandal is shocking. An analysis conducted by a consulting firm hired by Wells Fargo concluded that bank employees opened up over 1.5 million deposit accounts that may not have been authorized, according to the CFPB. Wells Fargo is being slapped with the largest penalty since the CFPB was founded in 2011. The bank agreed to pay $185 million in fines, along with $5 million to refund customers. The report says that "employees moved funds from customers' existing accounts into newly-created accounts without theier knowledge or consent," which resulted in "customers being charged for insufficient funds or overdraft fees," since their original accounts didn't contain the money. What's more is that "Wells Fargo employees also submitted applications for 565,443 credit card accounts without their knowledge or consent," causing customers who had unauthorized credit cards opened in their names to be "hit by annual fees, interest charges and other fees."
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Wells Fargo Fires 5,300 Employees For Creating Millions of Phony Accounts

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  • Typical (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 08, 2016 @05:11PM (#52850929)

    That's what they get for putting unrealistic quotas on the employees.

    • Re:Typical (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ourlovecanlastforeve ( 795111 ) on Thursday September 08, 2016 @05:19PM (#52850991)

      I am certain that none of those people fired were the managers who established the unrealistic quotas and instructed their staff to create the phoney accounts.

      Hiring managers is expensive. Hiring tellers is as easy as calling up Express Personnel and ordering another six-pack of desperate unemployed middle class peons.

    • by Rockoon ( 1252108 ) on Thursday September 08, 2016 @05:25PM (#52851035)
      This story is from the same CNNMoney that declared that Math is Racist [cnn.com]
      • by amicusNYCL ( 1538833 ) on Thursday September 08, 2016 @06:29PM (#52851421)

        That's not even the worst of it!

        Employees went so far as to create phony PIN numbers

        The PIN numbers weren't even real! It's amazing this fraud was detected at all, they looked just like actual PIN numbers!

      • Did you RTFA? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday September 08, 2016 @08:24PM (#52851971)
        "...some states started using recidivism models to guide sentencing. These take into account things like prior convictions, where you live, drug and alcohol use, previous police encounters, and criminal records of friends and family. "

        That sounds pretty awful to me. Grow up in a bad neighborhood thanks to 250 years of institutionalized racism (google it if you don't understand the term), Go directly to Jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200.
      • by sjames ( 1099 )

        You should actually read that link rather than just it's (not entirely accurate) title.

        • Nah, don't reward clickbait. If they want to be taken seriously, treat the reader with respect.
        • You should actually read that link rather than just it's (not entirely accurate) title.

          Which part of "Math is Racist" is not entirely wrong?

          Apparently they've run out of people and policies that they are willing to point at as racist (for instance, they are unwilling to call out Bill Clinton's 3-strikes crime bill as racist, even though it clearly is...)

      • This story is from the same CNNMoney that declared that Math is Racist [cnn.com]

        The story declared no such thing, but don't let that stop you. It describes how statistics and computer algorithms and models are used to perpetuate inequality and racist dynamics. It says math is being used to perpetuate racism, not that math is racist.

    • Re:Typical (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 08, 2016 @05:50PM (#52851207)

      Agreed OP. We actually had the same thing happen to us WAY back in the day when I was going to school and working for Gamestop part time.

      Story time kids:

      They would force employees to push gaming mag subscriptions onto customers and the quota was 7 per week. Now nobody wanted this crap. Customers wanted to come in to buy some games, and maybe talk shop. Subscribe to something that requires a credit card tho? OH HELL NO. Also, half of them weren't even old enough to have a card in the first place, but our DM would literally threaten the manager to fire him, who would threaten his employees to fire us if we didn't produce at least 1 subscription per day per week. So... in desperate times we as a collective of employees (who were actually much closer among retail stores than you'd think) all got together with a fiendish plan to game the system. We took pre-paid visa cards and threw 10 bucks on them and spent most of it on our lunch break. With the few pennies left on the card we'd then subscribe customers for them, giving them a subscription they couldn't be billed for and blowing our quotas out of the water. At first corporate was elated so many stores were suddenly producing a BOOM of subscriptions but like all good things it didn't last. Eventually the magazine publishers caught on, and everything started rolling downhill until literally 5 stores worth of employees and management were all fired and replaced within a month. I just barely escaped the shit-storm by hearing about the crack-down rumors and quitting ahead of time.

      Ah greed and corporate fuckwittery. Good times... sad times.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I once bought something at Best Buy and they asked me which of their magazines I wanted, a sports one or and entertainment one. I said neither, and then was told they were free and he stuck an entertainment one in my bag. Best Buy then gave my credit card number to the magazine company which charged me $40 and began sending me the magazine to my house.

        I had to call the magazine and explain it was credit card fraud (cardholder not present for transaction is the correct wording to use there) and they could

        • Re:Typical (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 08, 2016 @11:47PM (#52852667)

          "I once bought something at Best Buy and they asked me which of their magazines I wanted, a sports one or and entertainment one. I said neither, and then was told they were free and he stuck an entertainment one in my bag."

          (OP posting) That's exactly what we did with customers at gamestop.

          Told them they could have a "free" subscription then signed them up using our visa pre-paid cards with nothing on them so the magazine publishers and Gamestop corporate would get screwed for placing the burden of such stupid quotas on us. No regrets, and regulars got free mags for a while.

  • by IonOtter ( 629215 ) on Thursday September 08, 2016 @05:17PM (#52850971) Homepage

    How much you wanna bet most of those people were involved in robo-signing, [investopedia.com] or some other form of shenanigans OTHER than creating false accounts?

  • Just like police (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 08, 2016 @05:22PM (#52851011)

    Bankers are just like police. If you get caught doing something illegal, the worst possible penalty you face is losing your job. And you can just hop to another city and get employed again, it's just a lateral career move, not even really a firing. No criminal consequences, no jail time, nothing.

    And people wonder why bankers and police are so hated in America.

    • If you spin it right, your next job might even be a promotion. "Exceeded quarterly new account open quotas by 50% for eight straight quarters." I do the same thing...yesterday we had a "successful unannounced real-time server disaster recovery test scenario" and "validated the nightly backups are functional". For all the end-users, I was testing the backup procedures, upstream caching, etc. What actually happened was the Exchange server rebooted during an update and left all the services disabled and files
    • by Lust ( 14189 )

      And they profited through the experience - if they're told 'meet certain goals or lose your job' ...or... 'conduct illegal activity and you might lose your job if caught, meanwhile earn your bonus'...if anything, these people know how to maximize their expectation value.

  • rotten at the top (Score:5, Insightful)

    by supernova87a ( 532540 ) <kepler1@NoSpaM.hotmail.com> on Thursday September 08, 2016 @05:23PM (#52851015)
    Yeah, well, when you see this many people engaging in such widespread consumer fraud and malfeasance, it comes from the top.

    It has been documented and interviews with these employees recorded that they were under such pressure from bank managers (and they from VPs, etc) under threat of losing their jobs, that they felt they had to make their numbers in any way they had at their disposal. Including taking people's information that they'd been given for other legitimate purposes, and misusing it to create fake accounts.

    1. Volkswagen engineers being pressured to have their vehicles pass emissions
    2. Bank employees being pressured to sign up customers regardless of how infeasible
    3. Cable/credit card company call center agents being pressured not to let a customer go under any circumstances
    4. etc. etc. etc.

    The list goes on and on -- these all come from the assholes at the top demanding something that's not possible and effectively incentivizing / requiring front-line employees to lie, cheat and steal from consumers.

    Those are the people who should be even more aggressively prosecuted.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jmv ( 93421 )

      Yes, and since the people at the top giving incentives to cheat almost never face consequences, the behavior will continue.

    • by zlives ( 2009072 )

      this is what happens when they are too big (paid too much money (free speech) to the legislators) to fail.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      This is indeed how the scam works.

      Create an environment in which your employees are forced to break the law to retain employment, even though such behavior runs counter to official written policy.

      When caught: Pay lawyers to deflect blame and wave about the written policy, fire employees, walk away with a slap on the wrist fine.

      We see this all the way from fast food workers to top tier finance account managers.

      If a company benefits from fraud, they are guilty of fraud. Why does basic conflict of interest go

      • unpunished (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Lead Butthead ( 321013 ) on Thursday September 08, 2016 @05:50PM (#52851201) Journal

        If a company benefits from fraud, they are guilty of fraud. Why does basic conflict of interest go unpunished today?

        ... because they have the congress critters in their pocket. Koch brothers concluded many years ago it was better being the script writer behind the scene than being the actors on stage.

    • by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Thursday September 08, 2016 @06:08PM (#52851311) Homepage

      So... if I have a business unit that's losing money and I tell it to either turn a profit or they'll be laid off, am I responsible when the employees cheat and break the law to save their jobs because there's no other way? If you hand in your resignation, can I make you a counteroffer or is "ok" the only acceptable response? A lot of this pressure is natural, everybody's looking for ways to increase volume and price, cut costs and reduce losses. And then somebody takes it too far, but how far is too far? Who started it, who's doing it, who's in on it might not be so crystal clear.

      I mean it's a little easy to just blame it on your manager who'll blame it on their manager and so on all the way to the top until only Hitler is guilty and the rest were just following orders and trying to fulfill impossible goals. Sorry to Godwin the thread but this is a criminal conspiracy and while there's certainly leaders who should be doing hard time it should be pretty obvious to everyone that when you're faking customer accounts you're doing something blatantly illegal. I say aggressively prosecute everyone you can prove was in on it, top to bottom.

      • Re:rotten at the top (Score:5, Interesting)

        by supernova87a ( 532540 ) <kepler1@NoSpaM.hotmail.com> on Thursday September 08, 2016 @06:20PM (#52851379)
        Well, when you're the VP or head of the company and you're told by employees that there's no way to make these targets unless you do unethical or illegal things, then if you incentivize your employees to do those things, you won't have a strong defense that you didn't know or just turned a blind eye and told them to do whatever was necessary to get the company profitable, and they were acting on their own.
      • Re:rotten at the top (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Razed By TV ( 730353 ) on Thursday September 08, 2016 @06:53PM (#52851553)

        So... if I have a business unit that's losing money and I tell it to either turn a profit or they'll be laid off, am I responsible when the employees cheat and break the law to save their jobs because there's no other way?

        If you give the employees an unreasonble goal with insufficient tools to reach it, and tell them that they will be fired if they cannot reach it - I think that makes you responsible for their actions. In fact, that sounds like the definition of coercion.

        Now lets say your business isn't losing money, and the stock price has increased steadily since the fourth quarter of 2011 (like, say, Wells Fargo.) In this case, you have misrepresented the health of your company for the purpose of eliciting bad behavior. You don't have much of a defense in claiming ignorance because you have needlessly and intently set up the environment for this to happen. I would say that is absolutely criminal.

      • by sjames ( 1099 )

        When asked, most managers all the way up to the CxOs will claim they get the big bucks because they have the big responsibility. Well, here comes the responsibility and there they are ducking it.

      • by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

        It's not the employees' job to make the company profitable.

        No really, hear me out:

        The company makes a contract with an employee. His or her skills and time in exchange for a salary.

        Now your employee either holds up his side of the deal or not. If he or his business unit do not turn a profit, its one of several possible reasons. A they suck. B the product sucks. C the processes suck. D marketing sucks.

        In all these cases, except A, it's management's job to recognize this and do something about it. And even in

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by dj245 ( 732906 )

      Yeah, well, when you see this many people engaging in such widespread consumer fraud and malfeasance, it comes from the top. It has been documented and interviews with these employees recorded that they were under such pressure from bank managers (and they from VPs, etc) under threat of losing their jobs, that they felt they had to make their numbers in any way they had at their disposal. Including taking people's information that they'd been given for other legitimate purposes, and misusing it to create fake accounts. 1. Volkswagen engineers being pressured to have their vehicles pass emissions 2. Bank employees being pressured to sign up customers regardless of how infeasible 3. Cable/credit card company call center agents being pressured not to let a customer go under any circumstances 4. etc. etc. etc. The list goes on and on -- these all come from the assholes at the top demanding something that's not possible and effectively incentivizing / requiring front-line employees to lie, cheat and steal from consumers. Those are the people who should be even more aggressively prosecuted.

      This attitude is common across many industries. Maybe I was naive in my 20s but the idiots you went to high school with never smartened up. There is no miraculous supply of intelligent people who manage companies. The people who manage companies are usually the people who are best at overselling, overpromising, underdelivering, screwing people to make a buck, and don't think the rules apply to them.

  • by safetyinnumbers ( 1770570 ) on Thursday September 08, 2016 @05:25PM (#52851029)
    I don't suppose that the $16 a month that they charge just for having an account with them is part of the scam?
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If you're paying somebody to hold onto your money for you, you're doing something wrong.

    • Or the fact that they don't show you debit transactions for days and then process them all at once BEFORE any pending deposits... it's all a scam to try make you overdraft.

      I left WF behind a long time ago and I have been happy ever since.

  • by gatfirls ( 1315141 ) on Thursday September 08, 2016 @05:26PM (#52851047)

    .... to explain how it came up with the $100 million penalty figure."

    Ooh Ooh pick me!

    They sat down with Wells Fargo lawyers and accountants and came to an agreed upon amount.

    I don't know how people continue to bank with a place that has repeatedly been shown to do everything they can to screw their customers, it wasn't too long ago they were appealing the class action suit because they were stacking debit transactions largest to smallest to maximize overdraft revenue.

    • by imidan ( 559239 )

      I don't know how people continue to bank with a place that has repeatedly been shown to do everything they can to screw their customers

      I bank with Wells Fargo because they bought the bank I was going to before, and it's a little bit of a pain in the ass to change banks. I don't pay any fees for my various accounts there. I also don't keep very much money there, because their interest rates are comparable with other national banks: 0.01% APY on a savings account, 0.05% on a CD. You can trivially do better than that with on-line options.

      But, basically, inertia. I haven't had sufficient motivation to switch.

    • by Nethead ( 1563 ) <joe@nethead.com> on Thursday September 08, 2016 @07:37PM (#52851765) Homepage Journal

      "I don't know how people continue to bank with a place that has repeatedly been shown to do everything they can to screw their customers.."

      That has always been my question. About 6 months ago I noticed that my local community bank had opened a branch next to the grocery store/pharm that I stop at at least 4 times a week. I went in an opened an account and could not be happier. I hardly ever have to show ID, they know me by name. I'm support local a local business and the local businesses that use the bank (most of their customers are commercial.) I recognize most of the board as local civic leaders and business-people. It's a small bank with a dozen locations, serving just my county. My checking account number is under 1500 and my savings account number is under 500. The provide good e-services with 2FA. Their ATM is an off brand model that I've never seen so the chances of someone making a skimmer for it is slim. The checking account is free as long as I keep $300 in savings, not an issue. I've never been asked to upgrade or add accounts. They mail me a one page statement each month that is thoughtfully 3 holed punched for storage in a binder. Financial reviews on the web give it an A rating or 4 stars. The health of assets is considered excellent.

      Why, in the tangle of FSM's noodles do people go with these huge national banks? Good local banks and S&Ls are all over the place!

  • by wickerprints ( 1094741 ) on Thursday September 08, 2016 @05:27PM (#52851049)

    If only a single employee had done this, they'd be sent to prison for fraud, right after being fired. But because this behavior was so widespread and apparently came from top levels, what is corporate person that is Wells Fargo to face? A fine that amounts to a slap on the wrist. After all, we can't jail anyone who might be rich and powerful enough to have allowed such fraud to be perpetuated, can we? Too big to fail = too big to jail. And this exposes the blatant hypocrisy inherent to the notion of "corporate personhood."

    • They also said that they would reimburse fully all of the victims.
    • by sconeu ( 64226 )

      Question 2: How many of those 5300 ex-employees will face criminal charges for identity theft?

    • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

      by ravenshrike ( 808508 )

      *cough* Hillary Clinton *cough* It's not corporate personhood that's the problem. It's the idea that too big to fail or important to jail should have any legitimacy in our society.

      • by wickerprints ( 1094741 ) on Thursday September 08, 2016 @08:21PM (#52851957)

        Corporate personhood absolutely lies at the heart of the problem, because it is this legal doctrine that grants corporations those rights, privileges, and protections normally granted to actual persons; and in turn, corporations are, as a single legal "person," able to wield their disproportionate economic power to influence policies, and more importantly the enforcement thereof, in their favor, regardless of politics. This is the very definition of plutocracy, and it is why, while partisans on both sides of the political spectrum bicker ceaselessly about who is to blame for systemic corruption, nothing has been fixed: because corporations have bought the favor of everyone in government whose favor can be bought, which of course is the overwhelming majority.

        The real struggle in the United States is not about Democrat versus Republican. That ideological division is perpetuated by those who are in real power--the corporate plutocrats and the companies they control, from Silicon Valley to the mainstream media to traditional manufacturing and energy production. It is in their interests to continue to pit the voting public against each other in an ultimately futile battle, because it hides who really calls the shots.

    • If only a single employee had done this, they'd be sent to prison for fraud, right after being fired. But because this behavior was so widespread and apparently came from top levels, what is corporate person that is Wells Fargo to face?

      If 5300 people got sent to prison, the entire culture of underlings doing awful things to please asshole bosses would be interrupted. But, ahem, that would not be good for the Corporatist Oligarchy [bbc.com].

  • by jader3rd ( 2222716 ) on Thursday September 08, 2016 @05:29PM (#52851067)

    This sounds like a reason to make it finable for a company to have your SSN, unless they are the Social Security Office, or are your employer and are contributing to social security on your behalf.

    Having a unique ID, that's so easily obtainable, is ripe for abuse.

    • by taustin ( 171655 )

      Good luck. Banks are required by law to have your SSN, and to report any interest income you get on your money.

      The real corruption in this is that nobody will go to prison, despite 1.5 million instances of identity theft. Not a single person will spend a single day behind bars.

      Why on earth would banks not do this? There is no downside. The fine is going to end up less than the ill-gotten gains. Pure profit.

    • That;s going to make those 1099s hard to issue and of course complying with CIP.

      It would also do exactly nothing about this case - if you already have an account at that particular bank then creating another one is obviously going to be possible - it's just a number in a database after all.

      Of course 5300 people should be going to prison, but that's not going to happen.

    • The SSN wasn't important in this case. By definition, your bank has whatever information is required to open an account, and can thus duplicate it. Now, some form of digital signing could be used to fix those issues, but...

  • Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dracos ( 107777 ) on Thursday September 08, 2016 @05:44PM (#52851171)

    In capitalist America, stagecoach robs you!

  • by MMC Monster ( 602931 ) on Thursday September 08, 2016 @05:52PM (#52851219)

    The bank agreed to pay $185 million in fines, along with $5 million to refund customers.

    So they created millions of fake accounts and charged them fees ... and now they're required to only refund $5million to customers? Is each account only going to be refunded $5, or am I missing something here.

    If this was an individual and not a bank, he (or she) would be going to jail. This sounds like a collaborative effort. Why isn't a racketeering investigation taking place?

    • A couple weeks ago I was in a Wells Fargo to deposit a check (I hate going to banks for numerous reasons). It wasn't busy and I overheard a teller dealing with a client next to me.

      The client spoke broken English and I heard the teller explaining to him that he was being charged a fee because the balance in his checking account was below the required minimum. No compassion. No effort to try to mitigate the fee or move him into a no-fee account. The individual was sheepish and thanked the teller and just

      • Banks do not exist solely for your convenience; they exist to make money. Free checking accounts will lose the bank money unless enough money can be earned on the interest charged by loaning the money in the account to other people. For a moderate activity checking account, the breakeven point will be several hundred dollars. That covers the cost of processing checks, sending a monthly statement, paying employees and paying rent on the office.

        Banks have booklets of their fees, either out in the open or avai

    • Companies like this should be broken into little pieces and run locally. Open a new Citizens Bank of X County, in every county that they exist.

      Even if they honestly gave back every last bad fee to every individual account owner present and past (which they should be required to do), it still wouldn't be enough. Unexpectedly unavailable funds can cause a ripple effect in a person's life, which can potentially last for years. I can think of one such sequence just off the top of my head: insufficient
  • by dejitaru ( 4258167 ) on Thursday September 08, 2016 @05:54PM (#52851231)
    This was the stuff that made me sick when I worked at Bank of America almost a decade ago. Everyone was so persistent to getting their numbers (especially number of checking accounts they can open) that i'd see people open up checking accounts for a customer when they already had one, or open 2-3 for a new customer, just because. You were expected to open a minimum of 3 checking accounts per day, and my branch was very slow... yeah I rarely ever hit my numbers.
  • This explains... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ScentCone ( 795499 ) on Thursday September 08, 2016 @06:05PM (#52851301)
    I'm tending to an elderly (creeping Alzheimers-ish) parent with a Wells Fargo checking account. Out of blue she started getting a statement for a completely unused Wells Fargo-branded/partnered AmEx account. She had no recollection of ever setting something like that up, but I assumed that her trashed memory meant she checked some box or inadvertently opted in along the way without realizing it. That's still very possible. But this is even MORE possible. We are not amused.
    • I assumed that her trashed memory meant she checked some box or inadvertently opted in along the way without realizing it.

      But of course!

      Money laundering, mortgage fraud, this, the list goes on and on. Once again we confirm that the banks are criminal organizations [slashdot.org] that are too big to punish. And now, let's watch who will come running to their defense one more time with more hand waving denials :-)

      • I didn't say the bank, as a business, did it. I don't hold responsible all of those who have invested in Wells Fargo, or janitor in their HQ building, or a branch manager with whom I've never interacted. I'm glad they fire commissioned reps who pull stunts like this, just like many retailers or restaurants fire people who fake up numbers to pad their own paychecks.
  • No jail? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Thursday September 08, 2016 @06:08PM (#52851309)
    Why aren't these people going to jail?
    • Why aren't these people going to jail?

      You know, at this point Wells Fargo needs to go to jail. Yeah, I mean the company. Maybe they can build a huge freaking jail around the headquarters while everybody's at work.

    • shmoes in jail for doing something they were probably ordered to do by the powers that be isn't in the best interests of society? Jeez, what is it with people always wanting to punish the little guy. There are much, much better targets for your outrage than a few dirt poor losers trying to make rent this week.
  • I wonder if Wells Fargo is still using TekPortal. That thing is such a pile of crap that I would not trust my money with those assholes.

  • This happens over and over at companies who incentivize their customer service people to push services and accounts. If you ever go to Wells Fargo they always try to shift you into a new kind of account or something. And so I'm sure if not enough people walk in they just resort to making up fake people or changing account signups for people who didn't even show up.

    Creating this kind of structure is bad business and leads to dumb things like this.. Companies shouldn't be so stupid as to make this mistake ove

  • by Anonymous Coward

    But imagine paying fees on a ghost account you didn't even sign up for.

    Then imagine you try to sue them for it and it's thrown out of court because the cheating agent who signed you up agreed on your behalf to settle any differences in arbitration.

  • by Maclir ( 33773 ) on Thursday September 08, 2016 @08:30PM (#52851991) Journal

    by revoking it's banking license. They clearly are not capable of operating with the degree of ethics required, so shut them down. And mark all the executives as ineligible to work in a financial / securities / insurance business for the term of their working life.

  • It's only okay if executives do it. When they do it, they're finding new revenue sources and increasing stockholder value.

    When employees do it, it's fraud and they get fired.
  • Until now, I didn't know Wells Fargo employees had the same above-the-law protections as police officers. What other occupations allow you to break laws and get away with no legal repercussions?

  • Is there any way to check if you were one of the Wells Fargo customers they screwed over? Also, why did they only pay back $5 million to their compromised customers?
    • How to tell if you were/are being screwed by Wells Fargo? Function AmIBeingScrewed ( WellsFargoCustomerStatusFlag binary) binary( ( BEGIN return WellsFargoCustomerStatusFlag; END );
  • From a technical standpoint, moving money without your consent I can understand, but how the fuck do you not *KNOW* that you are getting charged an NSF fee?

    And what kind of moron doesn't at least investigate into what transpired to cause an NSF charge in the first place?

    Even if you had so much money that you wouldn't notice if some went missing due to incidental bank fees, if you're getting charged an NSF fee, then that means you DIDN'T have the money... so how the hell can someone not notice this?

  • First, the penalties are missing two zeros. This is about as criminal as it gets.

    Not only front line reps but management, compliance, legal are either involved or were deceived, both of which are grounds for mass terminations.

    Other damages?

    - Those overdrafts probably impacted credit scoring. $$$
    - overdrafts often cause other fees, higher costs for good and services, deposits for utility accounts, lots of impacts. $$$$
    - The privacy violations alone are worthy of higher penalties.
    - This should trigger enh

  • Somehow I feel it ought to be a crime for a company to create an environment in which crime is highly likely to happen; whether it is through lack of leadership or incompetence. Creating false accounts for profit is clearly fraud, in my view, and the scale of the problem indicates that the company leadership have been appallingly incompetent, at the very least, and they should be banned from running a business - I don't know if this is possible in the US, but it certainly is in UK.

  • Could you say that 5,300 makes it a conspiracy? The numbers are quite staggering and I don't see how it amounts to a mere $5 million in damages to the victims.

If all else fails, lower your standards.

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