Updated on September 12, 2016
Wells Fargo fired 5,300 employees who created over 1/2 million credit card accounts and over 1.5 million deposit accounts…without customer knowledge or consent. Wow!
**There are always two sides to the story. If you were fired and willing to tell your side of the story, please contact me.**
Read the full article on CNN Money or NPR or Forbes
Check your bank statements! I'm glad I have never had an account with Wells Fargo. If I had fake accounts opened in my name and money moved around without consent, I would really be upset. This would be reason enough for me to close my accounts. Here are some highlights from the article:
- Wells Fargo fired 5,300 employees related to the shady behavior (that's almost 2% of their 268k employees, not sure how they calculate 1%)
- Wells Fargo employees also submitted applications for 565,443 credit-card accounts without their knowledge or consent
- Bank employees opened up over 1.5 million deposit accounts that may not have been authorized
- “Wells Fargo employees secretly opened unauthorized accounts to hit sales targets and receive bonuses,” Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said in a statement.
Penalties
The bank will pay $185 million in fines + $5 million to refund customers. That's about $2.50 refund per bogus account. Is that enough? Not in my opinion! What happens to banks that cannot be trusted?
Has this happened to you?
I would love to hear from anyone who was affected by this. What phony accounts were opened in your name? How did you find out? What did Wells Fargo say if you asked them about it?
Wells Fargo needs to be chastised with sanctions. Did Wells Fargo fire 5,300 employees over this single issue? 5300 is a lot of bad people in one place. Now I hope someone honest gets moved up to help run Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo needs some new horses to pull the aging stagecoach.
Believe. WFHurtMe.com
I checked out your site – Could you explain the T-Shirt design?
The problem is that they aren’t really being upfront about it to their customers. I haven’t found a good place on their website to check it. I didn’t try customer service yet since I already didn’t trust them before this and I feel the answer is going to be “No, we didn’t ever touch YOUR account info or use it that way.” No matter if true or not.
The article said that customer money had already been refunded to the tune of 2.8 million, but that WF had set aside 5 million for that purpose. WtF…do they not know the extent of it themselves and are they still working to discover it?
At this point the only thing I have seen in the various articles that we can do for current WF customers is to check our WF statements and see if in fact we had some unexplained deposit at some point, and for us and everyone to check their credit reports and see if something we didn’t know about was opened. annualcreditreport.com is the only free one.
Another missing point, if an account was opened did WF close it? This is not good for credit scores.
Yep, they probably don’t know the full extent if I had to guess. This type of thing is hard to find so personally I would have another careful look at their statements (or for some it may be a first look).
I wonder if for all these extra accounts, if the customers were sent any credit cards or had the accounts added to online profiles. That should have been an easy way to detect it – “hmm why did I just get a new credit card in the mail that I didn’t apply for”.
Check out my post on getting your credit scores. One of the sites I listed, CreditKarma.com is free and they now provide 2 of your credit reports.
My question is, why hasn’t the top management been fired too? They evidently knew about it and encouraged it. How can you fire the employees and not the management?