Thursday, August 31, 2017

Wells Fargo - Bank or RICO Enterprise


Following the initial scandal of opening unwanted accounts for new customers, Wells Fargo went on to have more scandals involving car loans and mortgages, any one of which would have a small bank closed and its assets sold off. And now Wells Fargo has returned to the beginning with a report that their review has found millions more unauthorized accounts.
Wells Fargo said on Thursday that an internal review of its potentially fraudulent bank accounts had uncovered a total of 3.5 million such accounts, some 1.4 million more than it had previously estimated.

The bank also raised a new issue: unauthorized enrollments of customers in the bank’s online bill payment service. Wells Fargo said that it had found 528,000 cases in which customers may have been signed up without their knowledge or consent, and will refund $910,000 to customers who incurred fees or charges.

“We are working hard to ensure this never happens again and to build a better bank for the future,” Timothy J. Sloan, Wells Fargo’s chief executive, said in a written statement announcing the review’s results. “We apologize to everyone who was harmed.”

Wells Fargo touched off a scandal last September when it agreed to pay $185 million to settle three government lawsuits over the bank’s creation of potentially millions of unauthorized customer accounts.

Wells Fargo has acknowledged that thousands of employees, trying to meet aggressive sales goals, created accounts in customers’ names without their knowledge. Employees received bonuses for meeting the bank’s sales targets — and risked losing their jobs if they fell short.

At the time, the bank said that 2.1 million suspect accounts had been opened from 2011 to mid-2015. The bank later expanded its review by three years and examined 165 million bank accounts that were created from January 2009 through September 2016.

That review turned up the additional accounts that may have been fraudulent — a nearly 70 percent increase over Wells Fargo’s initial estimate.

The review Wells Fargo concluded on Thursday focused on retail bank accounts, and did not expand into other areas in which the bank has been accused of wrongdoing, including improperly withholding refunds that were due to some car loan customers and charging some customers for auto insurance that they did not need. Wells Fargo has said previously that it would refund customers who were affected by those actions.

The bank has also been accused of handling mortgages improperly by making unauthorized changes to the loans of borrowers in bankruptcy (which it has denied) and charging customers fees to extend applications that it delayed (an issue the bank said it is looking into).
It must be remembered that this is only on the retail banking side of Wells Fargo. There are other segments of Wells banking, some less regulated and therefore more open to hanky-panky. Fortunately for Wells, the Trump administration is unlikely to look for them.

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