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

Posted by BeauHD on from the what-goes-around-comes-around dept.

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."

9 of 341 comments (clear)

  1. Typical by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    1. Re:Typical by ourlovecanlastforeve · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Typical by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:Typical by lgw · · Score: 5, Insightful

      America doesn't have a "lower class". We have a "middle class" and a "working class". There's a lot of overlap in the pay, the distinction is mostly social, not economic. Banking teller is a middle-class job.

      This class distinction is why so few people are willing to enter the skilled trades, despite a lot of advantages to that in our increasingly-outsourced world.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
  2. Just like police by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. rotten at the top by supernova87a · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Obligatory by Dracos · · Score: 5, Funny

    In capitalist America, stagecoach robs you!

  5. Re:Stop linking to CNNMoney. by amicusNYCL · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

    --
    "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
  6. Re:Stop linking to CNNMoney. by eth1 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

    My PIN isn't real, either. It's 342i