I was doing research on Wells Fargo at CNN’s website when I stumbled across this fascinating article. Apparently Wells Fargo’s fraud was first reported May 15, 2015 (over a year ago):
money.cnn.com/…
The accounts are being opened by Wells Fargo employees under pressure to meet unrealistic sales goals and quotas, according to the civil complaint filed by the Los Angeles City Attorney.
The complaint charges that bank employees opened new accounts for existing customers without their authorization, in order to meet sales quotas. The employees also allegedly transferred money from customers' authorized accounts to pay fees on the unauthorized accounts.
When fees on unauthorized accounts went unpaid, some customers were placed into collection. Others had negative information placed on their credit reports as a result.
I did a little digging and I found Mike Malloy did a video on this CNN article on the next day May 6, 2015:
I did a little more digging and I found a forum in which commentators discussed this CNN article:
forum.mrmoneymustache.com/...
Some of these individuals worked in banking and wrote very damning comments (back on May 6, 2015 might I add). Here is my favorite (or should I say least favorite) quote from that forum as written by Indexer:
I worked in banking years ago. People in the industry talk, especially when they leave a terrible bank to go work somewhere hospitable. Wells Fargo has had this reputation for at least 5 years within the industry.
I heard the same story from at least 20 different people. Their goals are insane. I heard cases of family members of bankers opening accounts once a quarter and then closing them so the banker could get 'close' to hitting a goal. Tellers would commonly do the same thing to help the branch. If you didn't have 5 appointments on the books for the next day... you aren't going home, you are dialing until you have 5 appointments on the calendar for the next day. I also heard they got in trouble over OT pay... because of making people stay late. The bonuses you 'could' get were nice, but no one ever hit them. A lot of them left after Wells bought Wachovia and came to work at the bank I was at. And this was about as far from LA as you can be. ;) I did hear cases of people going the next step and opening accounts that weren't authorized. The worst case I ever heard was a guy who was opening credit cards for people he didn't talk to. The other banker reported something was up. The guy would sit in his office for an hour, make maybe 1 phone call, and then magically he opened 6 credit cards. Management ignored the report. The guy was blowing away his goals. Everyone loved him. Banker #2 still thinks something is up.... and then come the clients. Clients start coming in pissed off wanting to close their accounts.... I wonder why. Banker #2 has had it. Every single client who comes in with this complaint she tells them she will take care of it and close the extra credit card, but if they really want to be heard they need to call the area manager. Area manager's phone blows up.... banker #2 is the one who gets chewed a new one, and told banker #1 is doing nothing wrong, clearly banker #2 is just jealous. Banker #2 quits and comes to work at the same bank as me. She was super nice, a ton of her old clients followed her away from Wells Fargo because they trusted her, and she normally blew her goals out of the water. When I left that bank for a more lucrative career I kept my checking account there... I consider her(banker #2) to be my banker.
With all this information Wells Fargo’s protestation of ignorance and innocence by its top executives rings very hollow.
P.S. I made a shorter comment on this in another diary, but I thought this information was so good that it deserved its own diary. Plus I expanded on it. Here is the original also very good diary:
www.dailykos.com/...