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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."
That's what they get for putting unrealistic quotas on the employees.
How much you wanna bet most of those people were involved in robo-signing, or some other form of shenanigans OTHER than creating false accounts?
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Who says they didn't?
Wells Fargo is the biggest bunch of douche tools I have ever had the displeasure of working with. Arrogant but clueless!
I wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire!
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.
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.
I don't suppose that the $16 a month that they charge just for having an account with them is part of the scam?
This story is from the same CNNMoney that declared that Math is Racist
"His name was James Damore."
.... 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.
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."
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.
In capitalist America, stagecoach robs you!
My generation used to burn B of A branches every weekend for weenie roasts. It does not seem to have changed the bank's behavior.
Your generation obviously done a piss poor job of burning BoA branches; they're still in business.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
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.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
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?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
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.
(There's probably a Hillary joke in there somewhere.)
Based on my experience in Cubicle-Land, management probably suspected it but turned a blind eye, Sgt. Schultz-style, because it boosted their jurisdiction's sales stats.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Why aren't these people going to jail?
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.
"This isn't rocket science."
No, but it's social science. We've given up raising children with a sense of right and wrong and of shame. You take shame out of the equation and the fear of what "others" might think of you we end up with 5000+ employees who would rather victimize countless strangers so they can keep what they have rather than look for another job.
I don't give a rip if they were threatened with getting fired. They were selfish prats with no sense of ethics. It's this attitude that ALLOWS the powerful to control the "powerless".
"...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.
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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.