Wells Fargo fined $185 million for improper account openings

[calinewarkwc69]

NEW YORK - California and federal regulators fined Wells Fargo a combined $185 million on Thursday, alleging the bank’s employees illegally opened millions of unauthorized accounts for their customers in order to meet aggressive sales goals.

The San Francisco-based bank will pay $100 million to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal

Comments

[beuk]

Wells Fargo ain't shit and I hate that they show up at Boise Pride. An employee tabling at Pride asked me about my banking needs and I told him that free checking is important to me and he looked disappointed. I was steamed that WF was there to make money off of LGBTQ+ folks.

[beuk]

This comment wasn't totally relevant, but I like ranting about Wells Fargo.

[scriptedending]

Wells Fargo is a terrible bank.

[rhysande]

Rant away. My niece used to work for Wells Fargo and couldn't get out of there fast enough.

[anguisel]

I think sales quotas and other things like that should be taken out of business entirely. I refused to push credit cards on people working retail. It is flat predatory. When K-Mart did their Lease & Go thing, I always brought up Layaway first. There was no interest fee for layaway. There was for the lease. Take a $200 tv, by the time they finished the lease, they were paying an additional 100-200 on it with interest. Not to mention I found it shady as fuck. There were people I knew who hit all the checkpoints for the lease and were denied, then an old man/woman who was on social security and barely made the checkpoints but they'd get approved.

Not to mention the fact that you could be at your 9s with service but get fired because you didn't get the 3 credit cards a day quota.

[scriptedending]

I don't have a job, but I spend a lot of my free time maximizing credit card rewards/points/miles/bonuses, and banks doing predatory shit like this is exactly why I will never feel bad about it.

[ohmiya_sg]

Just gross.

[flyingwild]

I briefly worked at a WF call center, and so this does not surprise me at allI was hired for Online Customer Service. Basically, we'd be primarily helping people calling about accessing their account online, changing passwords, setting up bill pay, etc. Stuff like that. That's how the job was presented - straight customer service. That's what training was about

[lightframes]

So anyway, we're dealing with people who are angry because something is wrong with their account, we weren't actually given the ability to help them with much of it...and they still wanted us to sell them products that we didn't actually know much about.

A lot of companies do this and it makes no sense to me. If I'm calling to complain about something, I'm probably not going to then buy something on the same call...

[riotdorrrk]

this was an extremely interesting post, thanks.

"We could waive fees, but the requirements were so stupidly specific - they had to have a certain average amount in their account monthly (a pretty high amount, something like $2k), couldn't have overdrafted previously in the past six months, have a direct deposit set up, and a few other things"

by any chance, do you remember what the 'few other things' were? i was subjected to overdraft fees some years back when my paychecks from work were late (thanks, shady employer) and i didn't have any money in my account.

[flyingwild]

Unfortunately I can't recall specifics, as I left there over two years ago. But I do remember the big ones were a fairly high monthly average, no overdrafts the past six months, and a direct deposit going into the account. I think one was a limit to how many overdraft fees were waived within the past year or two, and one was possibly an account age requirement? Like, the account had to have been open for so long