Wells Fargo Employees Opened 3.5 Million Accounts Nobody Asked For
To hit impossible sales quotas, employees just invented the customers who'd hit them. The customers found out when the fees did.
Wells Fargo's internal sales culture had a name for it: "cross-selling," the practice of getting each customer into as many accounts and products as possible. It also had aggressive quotas attached, the kind that get you fired for missing them. Employees found the obvious workaround: stop waiting for real customers and start manufacturing fake ones.
Using existing customers' information without permission, staff opened deposit accounts, credit cards, and online banking enrollments nobody had requested, sometimes moving real money between a customer's real account and a fake one just to make it look funded. Some customers discovered the arrangement only when they were charged fees on accounts they'd never opened.
In September 2016 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined Wells Fargo $185 million and disclosed the bank had already fired 5,300 employees over it. That number was supposed to be the scandal. By August 2017, Wells Fargo admitted the real count of unauthorized accounts was 3.5 million, dating back to 2009 — almost double the original figure, discovered the way most of this story was discovered: because someone eventually checked.
CEO John Stumpf testified before Congress, apologized, and was fired shortly after, with $41 million in prior compensation clawed back. The rank-and-file employees who'd opened the fake accounts to survive the quotas Stumpf's bank had set for them were, notably, the ones fired first, in 2016, before anyone above them lost a cent.
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