Another Glitch from Wells Fargo Admitted by WFB (oops 570 homes foreclosed.)

Posted on December 5, 2018 by Neil Garfield

Wells is trying to buy its way out if this one with offers of $25,000 to people who lost homes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is the tip of the iceberg of liability for WFB, Citi, BofA, Chase and others who have very soft and porous balance sheets where liabilities are reported. Sure they have unreported trillions offshore, but the current reporting doesn’t come close to the actual liabilities of these predatory entities.

see Yes Another “Glitch” by Wells Fargo

To find out if you were one of the 570 start with finding out if Wells caused your foreclosure and the start digging to see how to determine whether your home was one of those foreclosed. We can probably help, first fill out our intake registration form. (FREE) CLICK HERE TO SUBMIT REGISTRATION. 

It may seem like free money but actually it is blood money. They owe you a lot more than $25,000 from what I can see here. Check with counsel before you go accepting pennies on the dollar of a valuable claim. 

 

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Wells Fargo workers describe mental health nightmares

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Neil Garfield

Current, former employees describe high-pressure work environment.  If you think working for Wells Fargo is stressfu- you ought to have them illegally foreclose on your home!

http://www.wmdt.com/life/money/wells-fargo-workers-describe-mental-health-nightmares/42240548?item=0

By Matt Egan
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) – For Janis Barinsky, a former Wells Fargo banker, it started with stress-induced migraines and severe anxiety.

She says trying to balance the bank’s aggressive sales goals without doing something illegal and sacrificing her morals pushed her into deep depression.

Barinsky worked for Wells Fargo from 2002 to 2013 as a personal banker and a business specialist at several locations in Northern California and Idaho. She told CNNMoney she “internalized this constant pressure — and it manifested itself in physical, emotional and psychological problems in my life.”

The bank last month admitted to creating as many as 2 million unauthorized bank and credit card accounts. Almost immediately after the revelations, CNNMoney was inundated with dozens of emails from Wells Fargo workers, both current and former, who described the high-pressure work environment. Many of these workers said they suffered mental health issues as a result.

It was an environment where unethical behavior was rewarded, many former employees say. Barinsky says she watched colleagues get lucrative bonuses and even promotions after hitting unrealistic goals by using unethical practices.

The mental health issues forced Barinsky to go on medical leave and she sought treatment from psychologists. Eventually, she was forced to retire.

Barinsky, who today is 63 years old, said efforts to speak up by calling the Wells Fargo ethics line, an internal hotline for confidentially flagging bad behavior, repeatedly didn’t work. That echoes claims made by other former employees.

“I am not alone,” said Barinsky. “I am positive many former employees have experienced and are experiencing these lasting and devastating effects of the abuse we suffered as Wells Fargo employees.”

Jeremy Mohr of Pennsylvania said he too felt “ridiculous” pressure to hit “unreasonable” sales goals after Wells Fargo took over his Wachovia branch in 2009. He described getting “hounded” about his performance by “obsessive compulsive, controlling management.”

Mohr recalled being constantly observed by managers, who would critique his interactions with customers. The observations were recorded and Mohr had to sign off on the documents. One time, Mohr was told to sign a document indicating he had just been observed on a customer interaction, even though that hadn’t happened. He signed the form, and three months later, Mohr was fired in early 2011 for “willful misconduct” tied to this incident.

Mohr found it extremely difficult to find another job and it ultimately led to a personal bankruptcy. The experience left him humiliated.

“I went into depression, I contemplated suicide…from losing my job,” said Mohr.

In June 2011, he used exhaust fumes from his father’s car to attempt suicide. Mohr said he was hospitalized for carbon monoxide poisoning after his ex-wife discovered him.

“The catalyst was the s— that Wells Fargo did to me,” Mohr said. Today, Mohr, 40, is happily employed, working as a bartender at Houlihan’s in Hershey, and has plans to buy a home. “I have fun at work. It’s a great environment,” he said.

The experiences recounted by these employees underscore the human toll inflicted by a work culture that many former Wells Fargo employees said forced them to cheat and even break the law. Some described migraines and severe anxiety. Several complained of stomach ailments because they were denied bathroom breaks, a problem one banker described recently to a Wells Fargo executive at a California State Assembly hearing.

In a statement to CNNMoney, Wells Fargo acknowledged that “we have let down our customers and our team members.” The bank said it is “making fundamental changes to help ensure our team members are supported in upholding our customer-focused culture.” That includes the recent decision to scrap the controversial sales goals.

Tim Sloan, who was hastily elevated to CEO earlier this month after John Stumpf suddenly resigned, admitted that Wells Fargo “had serious problems” at its retail bank. Sloan recently told analysts it would be an “understatement” to say Wells Fargo employees have been “put through the wringer” as a result of the scandal.

Extreme stress at work can lead to severe mental health problems, like depression and psychosis, which can be worsened when there is a component of illegal activity, according to Paul Gionfriddo, CEO of Mental Health America, a nonprofit focused on advocacy and support.

The culture was not easy on even the managers. Susan Fischer, a former Wells Fargo branch manager in Arizona, said she suffered “severe depression and anxiety” after being pushed to instruct employees to open unauthorized accounts in 2007. Fischer had to take medical leave and ultimately resigned in 2008 due to the stress. “It was an extremely dark period for me,” she said.

The nightmares extended to the bankers who handled home mortgages too. Lisa Skipton said her managers inside Wells Fargo’s mortgage division made her feel like a “worthless human being” while she worked as a loan document specialist in 2012 and 2013.

She recalled experiencing “bullying, punishment and intimidation” at Wells Fargo and said this impacted her self-esteem and mental health.

Skipton said that “several times a day,” managers at her Iowa branch would pull up statistics to measure her against other employees. For instance, they would email out tables every few hours showing how many mortgage files each employee touched, how many were sent to closing, how many calls they made an hour and their customer loyalty survey results.

“Depending on when they pulled the numbers, you could be a hero in one hour, and a worthless employee in the next hour,” she recalled.

She said managers would even block bonuses that were already earned by putting employees on performance improvement plans.

“Every day you went to work you wondered…am I a good employee today or a worthless one?”

Kipton said the final straw came when her managers showed no compassion after her 25-year-old daughter was hospitalized and nearly died. Instead of support, she said her supervisors criticized her performance. That’s when she quit.

“Although I have been away from Wells Fargo for years, I still feel sick to my stomach every time I drive by a Wells Fargo branch,” Skipton said.

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14% Of Polled Wells Fargo Customers Have Decided To Leave The Bank- Will You?

Posted on October 24, 2016 by Neil Garfield

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-24/14-polled-wells-fargo-customers-have-decided-leave-bank

Wells Fargo’s illegal cross-selling and fraudulent account creation practices appear to have caught up with the bank, just days after CEO John Stumpf announced his surprise resignation. As Bloomberg reports, management consultancy cg42 released a poll showing 14% of Wells Fargo customers have decided to leave the bank, “potentially withdrawing billions of dollars and crimping revenue.”

The data confirms what a separate poll by SurveyMonkey Intelligence released last week revealed. According to the survey, since the scandal broke, Wells Fargo has been losing asmuch as 140,000 of its mobile customers every week. The report finds that while the bank reported a downturn in new customer applications and accounts opened since the scandal broke, Wells Fargo curiously hasn’t reported on its customer churn rates. That is, the rate at which Wells Fargo is losing customers as they close their accounts after the scandal. (Conversely, customer retention rates would reveal the rate of customers keeping their accounts. Either metric works.)

Wells Fargo account scandal impact

In September, when the scandal hit, Wells Fargo Mobile download numbers dropped lower than in any other month in 2016.

Wells Fargo app downloads in 2016

 

Looking specifically at the 30 days after the Wells Fargo scandal broke and comparing them to the previous 30 days, downloads of the Wells Fargo Mobile app dropped by 7.7%.

Wells Fargo Mobile downloads after scandal

 

The trend is bank specific: Chase, BoA, and Citi all saw a modest increase in downloads in this same time period. In fact, while Chase, BoA, and Citi saw growth within the expected range for their app downloads after the scandal, only Wells showed a significant–and negative–departure from its previous growth rat

Bank app download rates after scandal

 

The survey also found that weekly user retention rates averaged 79.9% in August, and had even been slightly improving in the weeks leading up to the scandal breaking, with a weekly retention rate of 80.9% for the week ending September 7. But then the Wells Fargo account scandal hit, and weekly retention rates hit a six-month low of 78.0% for the week ending October 9.

Wells Fargo mobile retention

A 2.7% drop in the weekly user retention rate might not seem like much, but think about it in the context of the Wells Fargo Mobile app:

For a mobile app that has 7 million weekly active users, when the weekly user retention rate drops 2.5% from 80% to 78%, that’s an additional 140 thousand users who aren’t returning to the app from one week to the next. While some of those users might return in later weeks or months, some percentage of these hundreds of thousands of users that Wells Fargo has lost from week-to-week since the scandal began will never return.

* * *

The good news for Wells is that this exodus has yet to be reflected in the public figures released by the bank. Last week, the bank’s new CEO Tim Sloan said that customer traffic at branches and call centers remained at typical levels in September while deposit balances rose by $6.5 billion from the previous month; Folk however declined to provide updated figures.

Still, Wells is not taking any chances and in an attempt to quell the scandal that has engulfed its consumer bank, the bank will start broadcasting nationwide television commercials Monday night, outlining steps it has taken to halt abuses.

As Bloomberg adds, “the move escalates a public-relations campaign that has featured advertisements online and in newspapers, as the firm tries to convince customers it’s putting their interests first. Authorities fined the bank $185 million last month, saying branch workers may have opened more than 2 million unauthorized deposit accounts and credit cards over half a decade.”

“The advertising reiterates Wells Fargo’s commitment to customers and the steps we are taking to move forward and make things right,” Mark Folk, a company spokesman, said in an interview. Some ads will air during Sunday morning talk shows, and the push will include networks Univision and Telemundo, he said.

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California Suspends Dealings with Wells Fargo

Posted on September 30, 2016 by Neil Garfield

The real question is when government agencies and regulators PLUS law enforcement get the real message: Wells Fargo’s behavior in the account scandal is the tip of the iceberg and important corroboration of what most of the country has been saying for years — their business model is based upon fraud.

Wells Fargo has devolved into a PR machine designed to raise the price of the stock at the expense of trust, which in the long term will most likely result in most customers abandoning such banks for fear they will be the next target.

Get a consult! 202-838-6345

https://www.vcita.com/v/lendinglies to schedule CONSULT, leave message or make payments.
THIS ARTICLE IS NOT A LEGAL OPINION UPON WHICH YOU CAN RELY IN ANY INDIVIDUAL CASE. HIRE A LAWYER.
—————-

see http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article104739911.html

John Chiang, California Treasurer, has stopped doing business with Wells Fargo because of the scheme involving fraud, identity theft and customer gouging for services they never ordered on accounts they never opened. It is once again time for Government to scrutinize the overall business plan and business map of Wells Fargo and indeed all of the top (TBTF) banks.

Wells Fargo is attempting to do crisis management, to wit: making sure that nobody looks at other schemes inside the bank.

It is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) that was conceived by Senator Elizabeth Warren who has revealed the latest example of big bank fraud.

The simple fact is that in this case, Wells Fargo management made an absurd demand on their employees. Instead of the national average of 3 accounts per person they instructed managers and employees to produce 8 accounts per customer. Top management of Wells Fargo have been bankers for decades. They knew that most customers would not want, need or accept 5 more accounts. Yet they pressed hard on employees to meet this “goal.” Their objective was to defraud the investing public who held or would buy Wells Fargo stock.

In short, Wells Fargo is now the poster child for an essential defect in business structure of public companies. They conceive their “product” to be their stock. That is how management makes its money and that is how investors holding their stock like it until they realize that the entire platform known as Wells Fargo has devolved into a PR machine designed to raise the price of the stock at the expense of trust, which in the long term will most likely result in most customers abandoning such banks for fear they will be the next target. Such companies are eating their young and producing a bubble in asset values that, like the residential mortgage market, cannot be sustained by fundamental facts — i.e., real earnings on a real trajectory of growth.

So the PR piece about how they didn’t know what was going on is absurd along with their practices. Such policies don’t start with middle management or employees. They come from the top. And the goal was to create the illusion of a rapidly growing bank so that more people would buy their stock at ever increasing prices. That is what happens when you don’t make the individual members of management liable under criminal and civil laws for engaging in such behavior.

There was only one way that the Bank could achieve its goal of 8 accounts per customer — it had to be done without the knowledge or consent of the customers. Now Wells Fargo is trying to throw 5,000 employees under the bus. But this isn’t the first time that Wells Fargo has arrogantly thrown its customers and employees under the bus.

The creation of financial accounts in the name of a person without that person’s knowledge or consent is identity theft, assuming there was a profit motive. The result is that the person is subjected to false claims of high fees, their credit rating has a negative impact, and they are stuck dealing with as bank so large that most customers feel that they don’t have the resources to do anything once the fraud was discovered by the Consumer Financial protection Board (CFPB).

Creating a loan account for a loan that doesn’t exist is the same thing. In most cases the “loan closings” were shams — a show put on so that the customer would sign documents in which the actual party who loaned the money was left out of the documentation.

This was double fraud because the pension funds and other investors who deposited money with Wells Fargo and the other banks did so under the false understanding that their money would be used to buy Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) issued by a trust with assets consisting of a loan pool.

The truth has emerged — there were no loan pols in the trusts. The entire derivative market for residential “loans” is built on a giant lie.  But the consequences are so large that Government is afraid to do anything about it. Wells Fargo took money from pension funds and other “investors,” but did not give the proceeds of sale of the alleged MBS to the proprietary vehicle they created in the form of a trust.

Hence the trust was never funded and never acquired any property or loans. That means the “mortgage backed securities” were not mortgage backed BUT they were “Securities” under the standard definition such that the SEC should take action against the underwriters who disguised themselves as “master Servicers.”

In order to cover their tracks, Wells Fargo carefully coached their employees to take calls and state that there could be no settlement or modification or any loss mitigation unless the “borrower” was at least 90 days behind in their payments. So people stopped paying an entity that had no right to receive payment — with grave consequences.

The 90 day statement was probably legal advice and certainly a lie. There was no 90 day requirement and there was no legal reason for a borrower to go into a position where the pretender lender could declare a default. The banks were steering as many people, like cattle, into defaults because of coercion by the bank who later deny that they had instructed the borrower to stop making payments.

So Wells Fargo and other investment banks were opening depository accounts for institutional customers under false pretenses, while they opened up loan accounts under false pretenses, and then  used the identity of BOTH “investors” and “borrowers” as a vehicle to steal all the money put up for investments and to make money on the illusion of loans between the payee on the note and the homeowner.

In the end the only document that was legal in thee entire chain was a forced sale and/or judgment of foreclosure. When the deed issues in a forced sale, that creates virtually insurmountable presumptions that everything that preceded the sale was valid, thus changing history.

The residential mortgage loan market was considerably more complex than what Wells Fargo did with the opening of the unwanted commercial accounts but the objective was the same — to make money on their stock and siphon off vast sums of money into off-shore accounts. And the methods, when you boil it all down, were the same. And the arrogant violation of law and trust was the same.

 

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Gretchen Morgenson: In Wells Fargo’s Bogus Accounts, Echoes of Foreclosure Abuses

Posted on September 22, 2016 by Neil Garfield

John Stumpf, the chairman and chief executive of Wells Fargo, won a dubious achievement award from one of his interrogators during Tuesday’s scorching hearings on Capitol Hill. The bank’s yearslong practice of opening bogus accounts for customers and charging fees to do so, said Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, had united the Senate Banking Committee on a major topic for the first time in a decade. “And not in a good way,” he added.

But this was not the first time problematic and pervasive activities at Wells Fargo succeeded in uniting a disparate group. After observing years of abusive mortgage loan servicing practices at the bank, an increasing number of judges hearing foreclosure cases after the financial crisis grew to understand that banks could not always be trusted in their pleadings.

This was a major shift: For decades, the nation’s courts had been largely pro-bank when hearing foreclosure cases, accepting what big financial institutions produced in documentation and amounts owed by borrowers.

“Wells didn’t intentionally educate judges. They didn’t raise their hand and say, ‘Judge, we’re sorry,’” said O. Max Gardner III, a prominent foreclosure defense lawyer who teaches consumer counsel how to represent troubled borrowers. “It was people really digging in and having the resources and the time to ask the right questions about what they were doing with the money.” Those practices included levying improper fees and incorrectly foreclosing on homes.

Tom Goyda, a Wells Fargo spokesman, said: “The housing downturn was a challenging time for our nation, and Wells Fargo has acknowledged that we made mistakes in the handling of mortgage foreclosures along the way. Lenders, investors, along with policy makers and regulators — all sides — learned foreclosure processes had to be addressed, and Wells Fargo made significant improvements to the way we work with customers when they fall behind in their payments and during the foreclosure process.”

During the financial crisis, Wells Fargo was at a remove from Wall Street and was not a big player in creating toxic and complex mortgage securities that were engineered to fail. But the bank’s ability to emerge from the crisis with a relatively good reputation is something of a mystery to anyone who paid attention to its aggressive foreclosure activities.

There were enough problematic foreclosure cases involving Wells Fargo moving through the courts that the bank’s dubious practices seemed as pervasive then as the questionable account-opening scheme does now. And some of the elements of both scandals — improper fees and forgeries — are the same.

  The only difference: Mr. Stumpf, who was named Wells’s chief executive in 2007, has apologized to the customers his bank harmed with its account opening charade. Lawyers who represented troubled borrowers say no such apology came from Mr. Stumpf during the foreclosure mess.

“I sure as heck haven’t seen it,” said Linda Tirelli, a longtime foreclosure defense lawyer at Garvey Tirelli & Cushner in White Plains, who has often battled Wells Fargo. “I don’t remember ever hearing him apologize, because that would admit wrongdoing, and that’s not part of Wells Fargo’s corporate culture. Their culture is about not holding anybody at the top accountable.”

Some judges tried to hold Wells Fargo to account for its foreclosure practices. One was Elizabeth W. Magner, a federal bankruptcy judge in the Eastern District of Louisiana. She was among the first judges to identify problematic patterns in Wells Fargo’s foreclosure practice and to respond with vigor.

In an early 2008 case, she assessed damages and sanctions against Wells Fargo after concluding that the bank had levied fees on Dorothy Chase Stewart, a widowed borrower, without notifying her. This had the effect of pushing Ms. Stewart deeper into default and increasing the amounts she owed.

Judge Magner highlighted Wells’s “abusive imposition of unwarranted fees and charges” and its improper calculation of escrow payments. And, she added, Wells Fargo’s practice of not telling borrowers about the fees they were being charged “is not peculiar to loans involved in a bankruptcy.” Wells had also failed to credit Ms. Stewart with $1,800 that it had charged her for an eviction that did not occur.

An especially egregious aspect of the case involved Wells Fargo’s regular appraisals of the Stewart property. Banks conduct such appraisals when a property is in default to ensure that it is being maintained properly.

But in the Stewart case, the court cast doubt on two of the appraisals Wells Fargo charged Ms. Stewart for in 2005, noting that they were said to have been completed on the same day that Jefferson Parish, the location of the Stewart home, was under an evacuation order because of Hurricane Katrina. In addition, the court found that a unit of Wells had done the appraisals, charging double its costs for them.

In a 2013 Massachusetts case, William G. Young, a Federal District Court judge overseeing a foreclosure, was so distressed by Wells Fargo’s litigation tactics that he required the bank to provide him with a corporate resolution signed by its president and a majority of its board stating that they stood behind the conduct of the bank’s lawyers in the case.

“The disconnect between Wells Fargo’s publicly advertised face and its actual litigation conduct here could not be more extreme,” Judge Young wrote. “A quick visit to Wells Fargo’s website confirms that it vigorously promotes itself as consumer-friendly,” he continued, “a far cry from the hard-nosed win-at-any-cost stance it has adopted here.”

In Tuesday’s Senate hearing, Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, made a similar observation, comparing Wells Fargo’s stated rules of the road — respecting its customers — with its improper account-opening activities.

When judges criticized Wells Fargo in foreclosure cases, bank officials either maintained that the situation was unusual or that the judge was being unreasonable. Only occasionally did the bank concede that it had handled a case badly.

Responses like these also ring a bell today.

One remarkable foreclosure ruling against Wells Fargo came in January 2015, in a Missouri state court. Judge R. Brent Elliott ordered Wells to pay more than $3 million in punitive damages and other costs for harming David and Crystal Holm, borrowers in Holt, Mo., who fought the bank’s improper foreclosure of their home for more than six years.

“Defendant Wells Fargo’s deceptive and intentional conduct displayed a complete and total disregard for the rights” of the couple, wrote Judge Elliott, a circuit judge in the 43rd Judicial District of Missouri. “Wells Fargo took its money and moved on, with complete disregard to the human damage left in its wake.”

Punctuating his view, Judge Elliott cited the testimony of a bank employee who told the court: “I’m not here as a human being. I’m here as a representative of Wells Fargo.”

Wells Fargo said it was appealing the case.

Finally, there was the scathing 2010 contempt ruling in a Wells Fargo foreclosure case by Jeff Bohm, a federal bankruptcy judge in Houston. To the bank’s argument that unintentional errors, including a computer malfunction, had caused Wells to demand money from two borrowers who had previously settled with the lender, Judge Bohm conceded that mistakes could happen.

“However, when mistakes happen not once, not twice, but repeatedly,” he continued, “and when actions are not taken to correct these mistakes within a reasonable period of time, the failure to right the wrong — particularly when the basis for the problem is a monthslong violation of an agreed judgment — the excuse of ‘mistakes happen’ has no credence.”

Seems as though Judge Bohm was onto something.

Twitter: @gmorgenson


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Wells Fargo CEO says bad employees were behind scandal over unsolicited accounts

Posted on September 13, 2016 by Neil Garfield
By Emily Glazer

CEO John Stumpf says: ‘ There was no incentive to do bad things’

 John Stumpf, chief executive of Wells Fargo & Co., began to speak publicly Tuesday for the first time since the bank was slapped with a $185 million fine last week over its sales practices, defending the firm and the work he said it had already been doing to weed out bad behavior.

But Stumpf, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, wouldn’t comment on who was ultimately responsible for the practices and sales-driven culture that led employees to open as many as two million accounts without customers’ knowledge.Stumpf said that at the bank, “There was no incentive to do bad things.”

Rather, Stumpf appeared to lay blame for the problems with the employees involved than with any flaw in Wells Fargo’s (WFC) ystems or culture. He said that some employees won’t “honor” the bank’s culture and that the bank had changed its sales goals to put in more discipline and to take “more risk off the table.”

“I wish it would be zero but if they’re not going to do the thing that we ask them to do — put customers first, honor our vision and values — I don’t want them here,” he said. “I really don’t.”

An expanded version of this article appears at WSJ.com (http://www.wsj.com/articles/wells-fargo-ceo-defends-bank-culture-lays-blame-with-bad-employees-1473784452?mod=mktw).

Filed under: foreclosure | Tagged: , | 6 Comments »

It’s Magic! Wells Fargo creates New Accounts, Customers and Mortgage Instruments!

Posted on September 13, 2016 by Neil Garfield
Not only can Wells Fargo create mortgage documents out of thin air, but they can create new accounts and customers too! It's oh so amazing what Wells Fargo can do!

Not only can Wells Fargo create mortgage documents out of thin air, but they can create new accounts and customers too! It’s oh so amazing what Wells Fargo can do!

By the Lending Lies Team

It is now obvious that the major banks have gone rogue. The latest Wall Street scandal shows that 5,800 Wells Fargo employees engaged in identity theft by knowingly setting up ghost accounts not only to bolster their sales commissions but to improve Wells Fargo’s bottom line. Where is the outrage? All customers should close their accounts with Wells Fargo to demonstrate that consumers demand accountability from their banks.

A decade has passed since the general public became aware of the outrageous mortgage fraud- and to date, the government at the behest of the big banks, has not done anything of real consequence to instill accountability and lawfulness in the lending and servicing industry.

The banks have now been conditioned that they can break any law, commit fraud, and profit from their dirty deeds and that their only punishment will be a slap on the wrist and a small fine. The fines levied against the big banks are now computed as a “cost of doing business” and added into their profit and loss analysis. The executives can relax knowing that their white collar crimes will raise barely an eyebrow and low-level employees who participate in these schemes will simply be dismissed.

Wells Fargo is a perfect example of the Fraud-Profit banking business cycle. Wells Fargo paid a little under $190 million in fines and restitution after 5,300 employees were caught opening over 2 million unauthorized bank and credit card accounts- but made how many millions by doing so? Fraudulent practices are now mainstream procedures and if by chance a bank is caught participating in illegal behavior – an insignificant fee is paid and business goes on until the next scandal is revealed.

The large fines being assessed against the big banks are evidence that crimes  have been committed and yet no criminal charges are filed. Executives appear to have plutonium shields that deflect any type of misconduct investigation or criminal charges being filed. Wells Fargo claims that the problems were systemic in nature but the general public, stakeholders and consumer advocates question why Wells Fargo is accomodated to act above the law.

The Wells Fargo modus operandi is to let low-level employees be scapegoated and take the fall. Temporary employees will likely not be eligible for unemployment benefits, but permanent employees will likely be able to claim unemployment if they weren’t fired for cause.

It is quite obvious that these profit schemes at Wells Fargo occur from the top down and yet no formal investigation of the ring leaders will be conducted. How could 5,300 Wells Fargo employees scattered across the United States all be engaging in the same fraudulent behavior unless this was a master-plan designed and implemented by upper management? What other scams are being perpetrated against Wells Fargo customers?

It is already established that Wells Fargo forecloses on homes that they don’t own, creates legal documents out of thin air and participates in other unsavory mortgage servicing activities. Wells Fargo has now been fined billions of dollars over the last decade for business improprieties by the Consumer Fraud Protection Bureau, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Attorney Generals at the state level, and has also paid homeowners millions of dollars in private litigation to settle servicing and foreclosure violations of law. Why has there not been a top to bottom investigation by regulators regarding these unscrupulous and illegal practices that undermine consumers and investors alike?

Regulators have failed the American people by failing to hold individual executives and bankers accountable. Until the system punishes the wrong doers and holds these individuals accountable, these institutions will continue to devise illegal and predatory schemes and destroy any remaining integrity in the banking system. The FBI and Department of Justice simply wag their fingers while doing nothing to enforce the rules, regulations and laws that govern banking practices.

Without enforcement and prosecution Wells Fargo and other banking organizations will continue to harm customers and investors. If you can’t trust the banks to safeguard investments, accounts and even consumer privacy- you are better off not doing business with such an organization. Your own mattress or coffee can buried in the back yard begin to look like safer places to put your money.

Representative Maxine Waters who is the top Democrat within the House Financial Services Committee commented that the Wells Fargo settlement mimics the same practices that occurred during the financial crisis noting that employee compensation protocols should not encourage employees to break the law. “It may be the case that some banks are simply too big and complex to manage effectively,” Waters commented.

At this point it is blatantly obvious that bank examiners must scrutinize the business practices of Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo’s behavior is damaging to the entire banking industry and has proven that in order to generate revenue they will engage in illegal and unethical business practices until forced to stop.

The CFPB and the OCC cannot criminally prosecute, but can refer cases to the Department of Justice, who has rarely taken meaningful action against bank executives. The OCC has the ability to remove officers and directors and bar particular individuals from working within the financial industry, but rarely does so and to date has not enacted any prohibitions against any Wells Fargo employees in this particular case.

Wells Fargo is already utilizing spin doctors for damage control. On Friday, Wells Fargo took out ads in every major newspaper as damage control and had the audacity to assure customers that Wells Fargo is committed to taking care of them. Obviously Wells Fargo’s customer care includes institutional customer identify theft, fraudulent foreclosure, and other unsavory business practices that may also undermine investors.

The bank executives at the mega banks have learned through the financial crisis and subsequent fallout that they can commit fraud, violate securities and bank laws, and be financially rewarded for their deliberate indiscretions and conduct. In fact Wells Fargo CEO Carrie Tolstedt, one of the masterminds of this fraud, announced her retirement in July, and is set to receive $124.6 million via stock for her fraudulent efforts. Congress may be holding inquiries and demand that some of Tolstedt’s compensation be clawed-back. See: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/09/13/wells-fargo-exec-who-headed-unit-involved-in-scandal-due-125-million-in-retirement.html

CEOs at the smaller and mid-sized banks will be prosecuted and heavily fined for the same practices the big banks engage in. There is something very wrong about the selective enforcement of law that allows the big banks to ravage economic stability with their misdeeds. The entire big banking system is a pathetic and unlawful sham.

Even Warren Buffett whose Berkshire-Hathaway applied to the SEC in July for special permission to purchase more Wells Fargo stock has gone silent:   https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-09-13/warren-buffett-s-silence-on-wells-fargo-speaks-volumes.  Truth is stranger than fiction.

For a list of Wells Fargo “misdeeds” see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo

 

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