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Up To 1.4M More Fake Wells Fargo Accounts Possible (siliconvalley.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Bay Area Newsgroup:
Wells Fargo may have opened as many as 3.5 million bogus bank accounts without its customers' permission, attorneys for customers suing the bank have alleged in a court filing, suggesting the bank may have created far more fake accounts than previously indicated. The plaintiffs' new estimate of bogus bank accounts is about 1.4 million, or 67%, higher than the original estimate -- disclosed last year as part of a settlement with regulators -- that up to 2.1 million accounts were opened without customers' permission... The attorneys covered a period from 2002 to 2017, rather than the previously scrutinized five-year stretch from 2011 to some time in 2016 in which the bank acknowledged setting up unauthorized accounts.
Wells Fargo terminated 5,300 employees for creating fake accounts, and their CEO now acknowledges that "we had an incentive program and a high-pressure sales culture within our community bank that drove behavior that many times was inappropriate and inconsistent with our values." In a possibly-related story, Wells Fargo plans to shut 450 branches over the next two years.
Wells Fargo terminated 5,300 employees for creating fake accounts, and their CEO now acknowledges that "we had an incentive program and a high-pressure sales culture within our community bank that drove behavior that many times was inappropriate and inconsistent with our values." In a possibly-related story, Wells Fargo plans to shut 450 branches over the next two years.
Closed our accounts with WF when the fake accounts issue first appeared and moved everything to a credit union, best move ever, customer service much better and I get small interest dividends and other perks like discounted tickets to the state fair in our area. Hope to refinance the mortgage with them soon too, and get away from the "for profit" lender.
There will be no jail time.
The DoJ is rotten to its core.
It's senior officials are inextricably linked with banking oligarchs.
It gives immunity to bank insiders, and enforces their private codes.
The Fed will make good all insider losses, at public expense.
Market will not save us.
Technology will not save us.
Politics will not save us.
Law is fallen.
All is lost.
Good to see all those people prosecuted for fraud, what, not one, not even the executives who planned it, not one single individual custodial sentences for mass fraud, I am sure that will kerb the banksters criminal behaviour, excellent precedent set by Uncle Tom Obama, bankers never go to jail, bankers always keep their bonuses, arms dealing, banking for warlords and terrorists, drug dealing, all a token percentage of the profits made by those criminal operations, thankyou for that precedent Uncle Tom Obama the Choom Gang Coward.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Time for another Government Bailout
their CEO now acknowledges that "we had an incentive program and a high-pressure sales culture within our community bank that drove behavior that many times was inappropriate and inconsistent with our values.
Maybe they should hire a guy to be like the head executive or something who would be in charge of the whole company and who would keep an eye out for shady shit like this. Oh yeah - and if that executive let this stuff happen on his watch he could be given a box to empty his desk into before security showed him to the parking lot.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
They're a utility, at this point they're required for receiving paychecks, required for getting tax money back from the government, required for shopping online
Face it, banks are not businesses any longer but a utility
better yet, lets do away the penal code so stuff like this isn't illegal. Then Republicans can claim they solved crime because by definition nothing you can do would be illegal. Sort of the the way the Orange One actually thinks, but I dont think he wants others to behave the way he does.
which was laundering money for arms and drug dealers. WF was doing what comes naturally.
How the West was won :)
The magic hand of the market will fix all of it. /sneer
--
BMO - who has lived through two major banking crises in his lifetime (you know, the kind that people kill themselves over), and expects more, because bankers are asshats, and most investment-bankers more so.
Banks have offered incentives and pit pressure on employees for decades. they're not the first or last.
Castor. Pfft.. quit whining. Was the system being gamed? We these guys smarter than the feds? smarter than the regulations. How would you advise we keep 2007/2008 crash from being repeated?
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
The red party is the best! Go red party!
Looks like some more Wells Fargo Executives will be getting some well deserved huge bonuses when they retire to spend more time with their families.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The banks make plenty of money. If you don't know how to make money being a bank, you're in the wrong business. It's like running a casino, and you're always the winner. There's a fee for everything and everything has a fee. Plus, I get to take your money and invest it in risky financial constructs, plus, I get to act as broker for every financial transaction that passes through me, which also allows me to charge more fees.
The true reason for this was pure greed, you're shilling for billionaires crying about regulations that prevent them from being trillionaires, mostly by stealing even more of your money.
Why don't you look up the CEOs salaries of say, the three largest banks in America, and tell me again how banks are not making any money? You do understand that banks make billions in profits quarterly. And that's despite paying the top dogs salaries and bonuses that the average person would never see after a lifetime of work.
But sure, go ahead a cry a river about how the ultra rich aren't ultra ultra rich because of a few regulations. I can only assume I'm addressing Jared Kusher or his dad. Or maybe his paid Russian shill.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
There is a recent NPR story about the people inside the bank who complained to management about this. They got black marks on their U5 which made them unemployable at any other financial institution. Good luck getting that cleared up.
Never be a whistleblower in the US.
Lots of people are in jail because we have laws against drugs. And yet, drug companies and doctors have drugs. But some drugs are just illegal because of regulation. We need to remove these excessive regulations regarding drugs, then we would not have to pay so much in taxes to imprison people. It started with Reagen and his war on drugs. It's all the right's fault. They are the reason we pay too much in taxes to support jails full of prisoners because we have too much regulation regarding drugs.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Define "excess regulations". Regulations (implementations of legislation) have been added incrementally as problems arose. Don't like it? Have Congress rescind those laws. But be careful what you wish for, because businesses can't operate in a lawless environment
Have gnu, will travel.
I don't understand your comment. This wasn't something like the subprime market where bankers were taking advantage of loopholes opened up by deregulation. This was clearly illegal behavior, from several different angles. The CEO is using flowery language because he has too, there is on going litigation and if he comes out and says "our ass hat employees broke the law because we setup a framework that pretty much drove them to do it" then he's violating his obligation to Wells Fargo's investors are they are going to turn around and sue him for devaluing the company (forgot the legal term for it). Chances are they'll be doing that anyway if Wells Fargo loses any of the pending cases.
Tighter regulations might have led to this being caught sooner (though I don't see how) but they wouldn't have prevented it... they were breaking the law from the outset.
The deregulation opened up the banking *environment* to abuses much like the election of Trump has encouraged every hitler-wannabe to Roman-salute in public.
Create the envelope to work in and someone is always going to color outside the lines, but not too far. Make the envelope larger, and you get a Jackson Pollock instead of a Mondrian. (not to say that Pollock sucks....) because the freedom of too little regulation means that certain things are assumed - in this case the people actually creating the accounts were just following orders instead of being criminals (they thought). If "I was following orders" wasn't a good defense (and it seems to be a good defense so far), then why say "no" to your boss who wants to color outside the lines?
>This was clearly illegal behavior, from several different angles.
I know, but see, I lived through some of this stuff up close and personal (I was involved in the RE market in RI as a land surveying technician and thus got an up-close look at this stuff - the 2007-2008 debacle was just bigger - the motivations were the same). If you thought, for certain, you were going to jail if you committed fraud, most people wouldn't. But this was a huge scale at WF, and I am /sure/ the underlings doing the book-cooking didn't think they were doing "too fraudulent."
> The CEO is using flowery language because he has too, there is on going litigation and if he comes out and says "our ass hat employees broke the law because we setup a framework that pretty much drove them to do it" then he's violating his obligation to Wells Fargo's investors are they are going to turn around and sue him for devaluing the company (forgot the legal term for it).
Fiduciary Responsibility.
The CEO is supposed to be an employee, also. Even though far too many act as sole owners. (they only are if they own >50 percent of total stock).
Why the CEO is not behind bars is fucking telling, because I'm fucking /sure/ there would be evidence if someone attempted discovery. But nobody at the Justice Department is interested in discovery, because discovery is hard - it involves work.
> Chances are they'll be doing that anyway if Wells Fargo loses any of the pending cases.
Breaching fiduciary responsibility is hard to prove. If it was easy, Carly Fiorina would be a pauper.
>Tighter regulations might have led to this being caught sooner (though I don't see how) but they wouldn't have prevented it... they were breaking the law from the outset.
Tighter regulations and actual enforcement would have created an environment where people wouldn't break the envelope.
Various "free marketers" use the trope of "regulation wouldn't have stopped this anyway" as an argument against all regulation and support of lessaiz faire principles. Which is bullshit because between the Depression and the 80s, there weren't any large scale banking crises. Since the deregulation madness in the 80s, we have had the S&L crisis, RISDIC, (and possibly others I don't know of), the Dot Boom Dot Bust (because investment bankers bought into any company that had a name - fuck fundamentals) and the 2007-2008 mess.
Gordon Gekko was supposed to be a villain.
--
BMO
Come on. Do it. Give a dog a boner.
>misuse trope
I meant canard.
Mea culpa (and the Manhattan in my hand).
--
BMO
The same way every other business learns.. You let them go bankrupt, then you sell off their assets. When banks realize that a stupid decision will have actual consequences....
Actually the WF CEO, John Stumpf, "retired" last October in the wake of the scandal. He was punished by having $41 million taken away from his retirement package, leaving him with a paltry $133 million. Such severe punishment will surely serve as a warning to others!
http://fortune.com/2016/10/13/wells-fargo-ceo-john-stumpfs-career-ends-with-133-million-payday/
We had an incentive program and a high-pressure sales culture within our community bank that drove behavior that many times was inappropriate and inconsistent with our values.
Let's be clear here, if you have a high-pressure sales culture that encourages and rewards this sort of behavior, your value profits above all else.
So there's no fraud or crime in heavily regulated industries like pharmaceuticals, arms manufacture or the petroleum industry... some of the most heavily regulated industries in the US (and abroad)? I'm not arguing against regulation, the repeal of Glass-Steagall was just stupid for instance. I was merely pointing out that this was already criminal behavior and tossing on additional regulations to make it "more illegal" most likely would have done nothing to prevent it.
A perfect example is the RICO legislation. It gave law enforcement more teeth to go after organized crime (and was effective in that regard) but the Mafia didn't go "holy shit guys, maybe we should stop"... they just tried to look for ways to work around it and kept on with business as usual.
[ ] I am secretly gay, but hate gay people because Donald does
[ ] I am a wigger, but hate non-white people because Donald does
[X] I have used BREITBART.COM to find a sex partner
Don't let companies gamble with people's retirement accounts... And if it tanks, run to FDIC or other public agency for bailout.
Obama created the Consumer Finanical Protection Board (CFPB) and they are the agency that went after Well Fargo (after a banking employees union identified the problem).
Of course the republicans hate, hate, haaaaate the CFPB because congress can't neuter it like the way they neutered all other enforcement agencies - by starving them.
Looks like some more Wells Fargo Executives will be getting some well deserved huge bonuses when they retire to spend more time with their families.
I guess you will be disappointed to learn that Wells Fargo is clawing back $75M in bonuses. I'm sure there are still more bonuses they could take back, but it isn't quite the way you make it out to be.
Wells Fargo isn't a community bank. It's pretty much the antithesis of a community bank.
#DeleteChrome
WF did me in 2003.. I took a 3.5%$ HELOC & disbursed from an unauthorized 16% line of credit. I have all the docs. DOJ is not interested.
If a company instructs tellers to sell bogus policies, and heaps huge pressure on them to sign up customers - or be sacked - then those ARE their values. Wells Fargo may as well own that shit because no believes for a second that it happened without the full knowledge and direction of those in charge. The bank didn't stray from it's values, it changed the values to suit its bottom line.
no no no no no no.
You prosecute and JAIL actual higher ups. Don't imagine for a second that higher ups give a crap about the health or future of the companies they work for. The will keep the cash they got paid during their tenure regardless. A possible stretch of jail time will be a much more effective deterrent.
Yeah, that's a cute story.
But banks are making all-time record profits.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u...
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
Without regulation, we'd have a wild west with the customers' money. There's really nothing "left" about regulating an industry that can plunge most of capitalism into a world-wide crisis just because they can make a few bucks more that way. It's not the "left" that requires capitalism to keep working, it's capitalism itself that suffers from the behaviour of a small part of its members. Hence, they get regulated.
Without regulations, private profit will go hand in hand with public bail-outs and crises like the one in 2008. The loan-to-capital ratio was so far out of whack that ANY mishap would trigger a cascade failure of the system. It made massive profits for a few but when the system went down those profits were never returned and the cost of the failures was left with other companies and the public. Most capitalists would rather not have crises, thank you very much.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
I wonder if Wells Fargo is still using TekPortal/TekPortfolio as their online banking backend. I got out of banking over a decade ago, but they and the company I worked for were the only 2 major customers of that pile of dung. We had some major leaks and lots of downtime because it was such a pile of crap.
i guess you are trolling, but for starters, why you are 100% wrong, about "the left needs to answer for this", see
http://www.annavonreitz.com
if you want "rightist" and "free market" and "capitalist" banks you need actual money.
that means gold and silver coin in the u.s.
that is "capital". that would be "following regulations (the constitution)"....literally NO "banks" or any "government" at any level does that anymore.
instead, we have make-believe "Credit" and "bank credit".
mortgaging the nation and "loaning" it back to everyone, which is slavery, which is also outlawed...but they do it anyways.
part of "free market" is the "market' part. amongst other things, that means buying and selling and trading for good and services.
that implies, that there is not a mortgage on everyone's head, that the "money" physically exists and is not debt encumbered.
part of a "Free market" is disallowing certain types of contracts, because they no longer result in things being free.
look up the "laws of mortmain" re: corporate entities holding property ("churches" or otherwise). those are all being ignored too. look up the reasons such laws were enacted in the first place.
the present day "banking" market is the equivalent of a "real estate" market where noone is allowed to buy or own anything, only rent. oh, and we mortgaged your house, your land, your kids, and you will now work for that.
part of a "market" means you own things. the present "money" system is debt based....it disallows all ownership.
"leftists" LOL. the "bankers" are the biggest "leftists" there are.
they like centralized things. they love fiat currency and "credit". they love "nationalizing" things (read: establish a monopoly) ... just so long as all the bogus "interest" goes to them, they are all for "leftist" things.
they hate private property, they want to mortgage all the "citizens" and collect the "interest" and make them work for their own stolen "national credit"
look at any "Bank" and lets compare:
-- bank "credit" versus actual "dollars" on hand (Federal reserve notes are "legal tender")
-- federal reserve notes versus gold or silver on hand, that FRNs supposed to represent
you will quickly see the "banks" have purchased everything, they legalized there theft and counterfeiting operations, they long ago overthrew the treasury...they even overthrew the courts, incorporated everything (including "UNITED STATES, INC." and "CONGRESS (INC.), and "STATE of X" "city of Y" "county of Z"") .... and pull everyone into commerce.
common law, the american system, had real people and real money.
commerce, the merchant law, the banker "courts", is all incorporated entities and international in scope. fake money and fake people.
there is literally NOTHING the "banks" do that is the american system. "regulation" LOL. they overthrew all the "courts" and "congress" and the "States" and claimed they own it all.
they claimed the "americans" all died, and no longer have any currency in circulation.
AND YOU ARE TELLING US THAT THEY ARE "TOO REGULATED" because of the "LEFTISTS" ??!?!?!?!
the "banks" are just doing their usual press-gang/personage/inland piracy act.
capital offenses, BTW. they are lucky they are not guillotined.
http://www.annavonreitz.com
oh, and they placed fraudulent mortgage on the entire nation and enslaved everyone, and created fake "estates"
really, you should be thankful they are not sentenced to hard labour for 100 years paying off the 20 trillion of fraud the "banks" have done.
"leftists" LOL. the "Banks" are the biggest "leftists" around.
they hate actual money, they love "social" spending so long as they get interest on the "Deficit spending", they love "credit" because know they can charge false "interest" for things they create out of thin air with no risk to themselves, they hate to work or earn anything they prefer counterfeiting and fraud and usury, they are all about international commerce, and hate the laws of all nations and all countries.....
the "Bankers" are the only "leftists" of any significance. plus they are "Satanists" and all the time they do these things, they accuse everyone else of their crimes.
hence, they go around calling other people "leftists" as a distraction.
How is it that corporations can rip off or defraud tens of thousands of customers/victims and no one is going to jail?
At the very least there should be a $1000 fine per bogus account for the employees opening them, $1000 per account for their supervisors, $1000 per account for the executives responsible and another $10000 per account for the company as a whole. Anyone who can't pay goes to jail.
$35 billion might get Wells Fargo's attention.
If they don't want to be regulated, are the banks ready to accept the federal government dissolving the taxpayer funded protections they enjoy?
Careful, fractional reserve banking is a legal fiction as well. The rest of us have to get a dollar to spend a dollar.
>How typical that the left answers logic and reason with nonsense.
>Off topic trolling is completely unnecessary,
>The left caused this situation and now they need to be held accountable.
>- snruter rotsac
>Without regulations, private profit will go
to literal slavery
Jail time -- as long as they get to keep their money -- won't matter to them. They'll see it as the cost of doing business.
But, if you take all their money and bar them from being able to make more -- forcing them to get a real job, at real wages -- that will truly hurt them. Can you imagine one of these sociopathic egomaniacs having to work for minimum wage?
If only government had the stones to go after rich criminals with the same zeal they go after the poor ones.