
5,300 Wells Fargo employees fired for creating over 2M phony accounts - ojbyrne
http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/investing/wells-fargo-created-phony-accounts-bank-fees/index.html
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celticninja
And no one went to jail. It's becoming a bit of a refrain at this stage
whenever there is wrongdoing in banking.

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inputcoffee
The scale of this ... there has to be more to the story. 5,300 people didn't
co-ordinate this for years without anyone knowing, surely.

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cag_ii
Apparently WF determined that 5,300 fireable people knew about it.

LA Times did an article back in 2013 on the high-pressure sales culture there
that lead to these practices:

[http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-wells-fargo-sale-
press...](http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-wells-fargo-sale-
pressure-20131222-story.html)

This is blatant fraud IMO, this settlement is just a slap on the wrist.

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doug1001
isn't it also theft?

From a memo sent today to WF employees: "At Wells Fargo, when we make
mistakes, we are open about it, we take responsibility, and we take action"

the sentiment expressed in that memo is difficult to reconcile with this WF
memo to its customers:

We regret and take responsibility for any instances where customers may have
received a product that they did not request"

that sounds like an apology if a clerk accidentally sent to a few customers a
leather checkbook cover and charged them for it, even though the customer
never ordered it.

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stevep98
They are talking about new accounts in the customers name. The banker isn't
stealing the money for themselves. The bankers are doing it to meet quotas

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woodandsteel
But isn't the employee still committing a felony, like some sort of fraud?
Shouldn't they all go to jail, or at least pay large fines?

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Zigurd
5300 people doing this means it is impossible that no C-level executives knew.

If I stole one credit card application and created a fraudulent account,
forging a signature, I'd be doing time.

If I ran a ring of 20 people stealing credit card applications and forging
signatures, I'd be a fairly major federal case. Stephen Heymann would be
giving talks on how his clever cyber crime people put me away.

If I was the Keyser Soze of fraudulent credit card account creation, with
thousands of people working for me, they would put me in isolation in a
federal supermax.

But when a pillar of American banking does it, the fine is a mosquito bite and
nobody goes to jail.

EDIT: And we don't even get to find out the names of the individuals involved.
This NEEDS a leak.

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rlucas
WF is an institution where there almost certainly are 5300 people who've never
shook the hand of, much less meaningfully reported to, a C-level.

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Zigurd
You are overstating corporate facelessness and deniability. 5300 is about 2%
of Wells Fargo's global headcount, maybe 4% of US headcount. That's enough for
top of that management hierarchy to be senior management. There is an easy way
find out how high it goes. Keep squeezing the biggest fish you have caught and
see who they name.

But since the names are secret, it's not possible to know how far DoJ got.

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rlucas
I'm not somehow advocating for executive impunity.

I'm just responding to ggp about c-levels; saying that it's very plausible
that 5300 folks at WF are effectively isolated from c-levels.

Also, I tend to agree that secret corporate settlements do a disservice.
Perhaps there should be a max life on the seal/secrecy.

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atombath
I'm not sure who I can trust more, the salesman or the banker. =(

(I work at a bank and I'm a little jealous of the guy who left to work at the
sausage factory... because at least they understand engineering processes.)

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nibs
This is true. I make plant floor systems for the meat industry. Lots of modern
tech being employed by your local food processor(s).

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maerF0x0
So they get fined $180m and then lay off an estimated $200m of employees.

IMO its the ones left behind to work for WF that actually pay the price; the
remaining employees now have to increase their workload to cover for their
missing peers...

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Theofaron
And of course, senior management were totally ignorant of the practice.

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gumby
This is such a strange scam. Surely the amount of fees/person shouldn't be
enough to move the needle on a company like WF, not to mention how the
incentive could adequately spread around 5300 people (that's less than 400
accounts/person).

WF would have done better to be like the cable and phone companies and simply
add mystery monthly fees to the bill. Hardly anyone would notice.

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bdcravens
As I read it, these sham accounts were opened by employees to meet various
quotas, which are apparently based on accounts, not fee amounts.

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stevep98
This is true. A good friend of mine works at Wells Fargo, and has moved up the
ranks from banker up to regional manager.

I never understood the pressure he was under to open new accounts. Not new
customers, just new accounts for existing customers. For example, a new
savings account to split your savings up into long term, vacation, college
fund, home improvement.

As a banker he was supposed to open 40 new accounts a week, bare minimum.

One theory I had is that if you spread your money around like this, you're
more likely to go below the minimums required, so therefore more likely to
incur fees.

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gjolund
Too big to jail.

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ourmandave
I can hardly wait until the next president finally does something about these
get-off-with-a-slap-on-the-wrist banks!

<crickets>

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aphextron
This is the last straw I needed to dump Wells Fargo for good. I've never been
nickeled and dimed at every corner like this by any other bank in my life.

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zaro
Banks are fraudlent business by nature so it's not so surprising :)

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Justsignedup
> phony PIN numbers

Well... some tech geniuses right there! 5300 people. Opse that was a PIN
number. Damnit.

