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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.