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Wells Fargo Agrees to $1 Billion Fine Over Home and Auto Loan Abuses (reuters.com)
Wells Fargo got hit with a $1 billion fine Friday -- the largest ever issued by America's consumer protection agency. An anonymous reader quotes Reuters:
Taken together, the mortgage and auto programs ensnared more than 600,000 customers and will require nearly $300 million in refunds, the bank has said. The programs allowed Wells Fargo to earn fees from unneeded car insurance and penalties on mortgage paperwork that the bank had botched. For homebuyers, Wells Fargo promised to "rate lock" or freeze the interest rate for borrowers who got their mortgage paperwork finished within a few weeks. When that deadline slipped and it was the bank's fault, Wells Fargo could blame the customer. The penalty for late mortgage paperwork often topped $1000, according to a borrower lawsuit...
Drivers stung by insurance fees were wrongly pushed into policies that they did not need... Insurers working for Wells Fargo pushed policies onto more than 500,000 customers who already had coverage, the bank has said.
The penalty comes 18 months after Wells Fargo "admitted it opened sham accounts for customers -- a practice that likely ensnared millions...
Wells Fargo agreed to the new $1 billion fine "without admitting or denying wrongdoing."
Drivers stung by insurance fees were wrongly pushed into policies that they did not need... Insurers working for Wells Fargo pushed policies onto more than 500,000 customers who already had coverage, the bank has said.
The penalty comes 18 months after Wells Fargo "admitted it opened sham accounts for customers -- a practice that likely ensnared millions...
Wells Fargo agreed to the new $1 billion fine "without admitting or denying wrongdoing."
Mistakes were made, but bless their little cotton socks it seems that despite all this illegal activity no crimes were committed except by the stock holders who need to pay for this. Shocking! Just shocking I tell you!
Fine the execs. Until the execs lose their homes & their daughters have to give up their ponys they will not change their behaviour.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is going to get the death penalty for this.
Yes, and it'll be partisan: only the Republicans will want to kill it.
And now the banking industry is lobbying them heavily saying the problems that caused the financial crisis have been fixed.
I can say with 100% certainty that they haven't.
See, even if every banker has turned into a saint, all you need is some newly minted 26 year-old Harvard MBA who will look around and wonder why isn't any pushing the rules. He'll do so and get a 7 figure bonus. Others will follow and in order to get the big bucks, they'll have to bend the rules. Then as more catch on, they'll have to break the rules to get their bonuses.
We'll end up right where we were.
And add in the illegal collections - especially with student loans (that loan forgiveness after 10 years for certain professions? Yeah, right - Thanks DeVos!!)
The CFPB is the best thing that our government has done in decades for us little people and the fact that the Republicans - and it's ONLY the Republicans - want to get rid of it should tell us something about their values and priorities.
Let's see...
Yep, corporations have it so tough in America.. let's give them another tax break to make up for treating them like this eh?
then it wasn't high enough.
At the very least, the fine should be triple the profits of their unlawful behavior. Optimally, the bank should be broken up and the pieces sold off. At some point a business can not be allowed to remain in business. Wells Fargo was well past that point.
-- Will program for bandwidth
> So, hopefully, everyone will "vote with their wallet" on this debacle.
Wells Fargo is offering high salaries for experienced computer security professionals, but because we're currently in high demand we are quite free to choose which companies we accept interviews with. Who wants to work for a bunch of scumbags, in a toxic corporate culture? Not I, and not any of the security professionals O talk to.
Execs have no legal protection just because they worked for a corporation - not just fines, but prison. The thing is, you have to actually prove they were involved, or at least knew what was going on.
Large fines (and large liability awards) are the criminal justice system for corporations. Those can be assessed without finding an individual manager to blame - just that the company as a whole knew there was a problem and ignored it, or deliberately put people at risk for profit.
All the legal mechanisms are in place, but obviously that didn't fix the problem. The problem is willingness to prosecute in a corrupt system, and new laws coming out of that corrupt system are unlikely to improve things. There are positive examples, though. Sony was fined a large enough amount to make the CEO resign over the rootkit thing (and threatened with the corporate death penalty if it happened again). That's the system, working. Why doesn't it work more often?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
RICO act - The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly referred to as the RICO Act or simply RICO, is a United States federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization. This has proven over and over to be a criminal organization and needs to be treated that way. How many times do they have to steal huge sums of money from their clients until something is done about it. BTW-there are other banks that fall into this same category (JP Morgan, HSBC).
First of all, Houston is NOT "crime-rotted". In fact, it has a lower crime rate than Anchorage, Alaska. It's one of the safest big cities in America.
Second, Houston is most definitely run by Democrats. It's an extremely liberal city. They had the first openly lesbian mayor of any city in the US and currently has Democrats in all leadership positions.
You are welcome on my lawn.