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For the fifth time in six years, Wells Fargo is ponying up a lot of money to settle a scandal.
Wells Fargo is agreeing to a $3.7 billion settlement to resolve allegations by a top consumer agency that the bank’s «illegal» practices cost customers «billions of dollars.»
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency formed in 2011 in response to the financial collapse after the 2008 subprime-mortgage crisis, accused Wells Fargo of wrongly charging overdraft fees and even repossessing customers’ cars because of its own alleged problems with how it handled car loans.
Some customers had their homes wrongly foreclosed on because the bank «improperly denied» their applications to adjust their loans, according to the agency.
Wells Fargo said it has already been paying out the roughly $2 billion to customers affected by the alleged practices, and said that it will pay the $1.7 billion civil fine. In what has become a common practice in these types of resolutions, Wells Fargo neither admitted nor denied the CFPB’s allegations.
The company’s statement on Tuesday also said that it has already «made significant progress» in making changes, and that the agency itself is recognizing those improvements — the CFPB agreed to end a past settlement from 2016 related to student loans, Wells Fargo noted.
