Wells Fargo told employees to pretend like they didn't lose important customer papers

We stink!

Last month, Wells Fargo agreed to pay around $1.2 billion in a settlement with the U.S. government. That agreement was an admission that the banking giant knew that the home loans it was getting federally insured for were toxic and misled the Federal Housing Administration in order to get those certifications. A former employee is accusing Wells Fargo, in a lawsuit, of instructing customer service officials to lie to customers when the bank had lost the customers’ important paperwork.

Duke Tran, who was a customer service specialist at the bank, says that his supervisor berated him for telling a husband and wife that their loan contract was missing from an internal system.

Tran and others later received an email instructing them not to tell customers about situations "where we have a lost contract, deed, any type of document, really, but especially when it relates to securing a property," according to a copy of the email filed with the lawsuit.

The email told the employees "to say that we need to do further research or something similar" and then to escalate the phone call to a boss.

According to Tran, he was fired in 2014, after 10 years of working for Wells Fargo, and after he had told a couple that the bank’s copy of the loan contract was missing.