
Pervasive Sham Deals at Wells Fargo, and No One Noticed? - hvo
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/business/dealbook/pervasive-sham-deals-at-wells-fargo-and-no-one-noticed.html?src=me
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generj
One of the more surprising things I've discovered as I've worked more closely
with our QA guys is how little auditing goes on, especially when everything
seems to be doing well.

But I work in the relatively non-essential world of analytics. I can't imagine
that the world of finance is so lightly examined. But I guess 2007 showed us
that it really is lightly audited in some aspects.

Really, I think some of the difficulty is in the complexity of our financial
system. I'd argue it's similar to how no single person fully understands how a
modern OS runs on an x86 chip - usually it works, but there are issues hiding
in the shadows. Sometimes one of those CPU errata comes and bites you and the
system crashes. Other times there is a stack overflow - something that
obviously shouldn't have happened except the code auditing guys didn't do
their jobs.

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arcanus
> how little auditing goes on

Companies see Risk Desks, QA, etc. as 'cost centers', and try to keep these
budgets down.

Risk adjusted, they are massive profit centers. In addition to the actual $$
they save in fines, and stock price losses, the damage to the brand is often
in the billions. But it is hard to measure the impact of events that do not
occur.

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grawlinson
There was an AMA on Reddit with an ex-employee. Here's the link if anyone's
interested:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/521cjr/iama_former_we...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/521cjr/iama_former_wells_fargo_bank_employee_that_saw/)

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timmyelliot
This happened to us. A Wells Fargo private banker offered a new Line-of-
Credit. My wife said "no." We found a Line-of-Credit opened anyway. We
complained. They apologized, saying they misunderstood our conversation. Which
felt like they were of partially blaming us for not communicating clearly to
them.

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fenomas
How in the world can 5000+ people be "rogue employees"?

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mhuffman
> How in the world can 5000+ people be "rogue employees"?

Well they have 265,200 employees, so I can see 1%-2% of people maybe trying to
make a quick buck. You probably know at least 100 people. Can't you think of
at least two of them that would get up to some shady shit for a buck, given
the opportunity?

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eastern
Out of those 262,500, how many would be in consumer-facing sales jobs where an
opportunity to run these scams existed? One should look at 5,000 as a
percentage of /that/ number.

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toodlebunions
Inconceivable.

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mixedCase
Really? I would be confident in saying "Predictable". And obviously I'm not
condoning it, in case it needs to be stated.

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dhsjsjjsj
Based on the numbers in the article, the fake accounts generated about $1 each
on average. Based on my experience being charged fees much larger than $1 by
banks, it seems like the vast majority of the accounts must have generated no
fees.

I can easily see how that would happen. As a bank user, some line item in my
statement with $0 in it wouldn't raise any eyebrows to me. And if I did get
charged a fee, they would probably remove it if I complained. Even if my
complaint got escalated, what are the odds it would be attributed to a system
problem and not just some idiot who forgot he signed up for an account?

