It has been a few weeks since banking giant Wells Fargo agreed to pay $185 million for defrauding potentially billions of dollars from consumers. It has been about a week since Wells Fargo sat in front of a Senate Committee to take his public lashings (but no real punishment) from Senator Elizabeth Warren. It’s been virtually the same amount of time since it began to become clear that regardless of what executives at Wells Fargo want the public to believe, they knew all about the fraud being perpetrated on the American public. Wells Fargo executives, in their gutless passing of blame, boasted that they have fired 5,300 employees from managers down to lower than managers over this fraudulent affair. It turns out, they have also fired all kinds of people who did not participate in this fraudulent behavior and—in a class-action lawsuit just filed in California—were in fact fired because they did not participate in cooking their sales books.
"The biggest victims of this scheme are a class of people that nobody else has talked about," the lawsuit says. "The biggest victims of Wells Fargo's scam [are] the class of victims that were fired because they did not meet these cross sell quotas by engaging in the fraudulent scam that would line the CEO's pockets."
Executives profited off the scheme, stockholders made a profit over the last five years, and customers will "undoubtedly" get fees refunded, the suit argues. But people who were fired for refusing to break the law are left out in the cold, the lawyers claim.
The sales “goals” and other milestones were so unattainable, these employees argue, that one could only succeed at Wells Fargo if one were to break the law by defrauding customers.
The suit alleges wrongful termination, unlawful business practices and failure to pay overtime, among other things, and seeks damages of $2.6 billion — "and possibly more," according to the complaint.
Fingers crossed.