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Wells Fargo Fires 5,300 Employees For Creating Millions of Phony Accounts (cnn.com)
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."
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.
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.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
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.
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.
That wasn't capitalism it was fraud. For capitalism to work you have to actually produce something of value, and that doesn't happen with fraud.
"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.