Wells Fargo reached a $3.7 billion deal with regulators over the bank’s « widespread mismanagement » that allegedly hit more than 16 million consumer accounts.
Wells Fargo reached a $3.7 billion deal with regulators over the bank’s “widespread mismanagement” that allegedly hit more than 16 million consumer accounts.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said Wells Fargo’s systemic failures included some stuff that’s so egregious you kinda have to wonder whether the bank was just, like, testing how evil it could be before it got caught. Things like:
A full $2 billion of the settlement is going to compensate customers. (Which, I’m sure is a welcome payday, though it can hardly undo the trauma of having your house wrongfully foreclosed on or your car taken away…)
The watchdog agency also ordered Wells Fargo to pay a $1.7 billion civil penalty.
KEY CONTEXT
Sadly, all of this echoes earlier reports about Wells Fargo’s practices that have emerged since 2016, when its fake-accounts scandal made national headlines, my colleague Matt Egan writes.
As a refresher: Back then, the bank’s leadership was found to have pressured rank-and-file employees to aggressively push consumer products to boost sales and revenue to meet certain quotas. Wells Fargo workers ended up creating millions of bank accounts for customers without their knowledge.
In 2020, the bank paid $3 billion to the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission after admitting that, between 2002 and 2016, it pressured employees to meet “unrealistic sales goals that led thousands of employees to provide millions of accounts or products to customers under false pretenses or without consent, often by creating false records or misusing customers’ identities.
