Depth And Breadth Of Scandal At Wells Fargo Is Almost Beyond Belief

While we wait for the Republicans in the House to vote to throw tens of millions of Americans off of health insurance and bankrupt tens of thousands of others, including those with employer-sponsored health insurance, let’s spend a little time with our one of our favorite corporate criminals, Wells Fargo.

As you might remember, high-pressure sales tactics at the bank let to the opening of thousands of bogus accounts and credit cards by the sales staff without the authorization of the actual account owners simply to rack up additional fees. Wells Fargo initially claimed that this criminal activity was simply a result of some unethical employees and only went on for about five years. It soon emerged, however, that management had received hundreds of complaints about the practice from both inside and outside the firm and were well aware of what was going on, frequently firing the whistleblowers who came forward. In addition, this scam had been running for over a decade, double the time Wells had originally claimed.

So far, of course, Wells Fargo has merely receive just another slap on the wrist for this criminal behavior, paying a $185 million fine for the abuses. But that didn’t stop Wells from making it as hard as possible for customers to receive the restitution they were entitled to, trying to force each individual customer to go through arbitration to recover their stolen funds.

Now a shareholders’ lawsuit against Wells is uncovering just how deeply the unethical mentality was entrenched at the firm. The first revelation is that it now appears this scam of bogus account openings had been going on for 15 years. In addition, there was something called “Hit The Streets Thursdays” where the Wells Fargo sales staff would go to Social Security offices and sites where undocumented immigrants would be working and try to get people to sign up for a Wells Fargo account, offering to waive the check cashing fee for doing so. Of course, those people were probably not informed that there were other fees on the account that would offset the check cashing fee. And once that one account was set up, it made it possible for the salesperson to set up multiple other bogus accounts and generate fees from those.

Management was well aware of these practices and even encouraged them, as the Washington Post illustrates with the story of one Wells Fargo salesman: