Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan has only been on the job since October, but he's earned a 35%, $4.6m raise, despite flat earnings and a series of scandals since Sloan took over from the cartoonishly villainous John Stumpf.
Wells Fargo has admitted wrongdoing in defrauding 110,000 mortgage borrowers, and to make good on it, they're sending out letters that look like junk-mail, containing a form that customers have to fill in to confirm that they want their stolen money back; if Wells doesn't get a reply, it will assume that those customers are donating their settlements back to the bank's shareholders.
The Federal Reserve has concluded its investigation into Wells Fargo's decades' long practice of pressuring employees to open fraudulent accounts in the names of its customers to inflate its quarterly figures and rack up service charges.
A class action suit by some of the 3,500,000+ Wells Fargo customers defrauded in the company's fake account scam was foundering in Utah, thanks to the company's insistence that its binding arbitration clauses also applied to the accounts it fraudulently opened (that is, by agreeing not to sue the company for defrauding you over the accounts you opened, you were also agreeing not to sue them if it opened a bunch more accounts and forged your signature on the papers).
Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan — who inherited the most scandal-haunted bank of them all this year — reassured his investors in a CNN Money interview that not one dime of the tax savings the GOP will deliver to his company will be reinvested or used to increase wages: instead, it will all go to buy-backs and dividends.
Senators Bob Corker, Jeff Flake and John McCain talk a big game about not letting the GOP be the handmaiden of trumpist corruption, but when the chips were down last night, they voted with their party and a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Handmaid's Tale to pass legislation that lets financial institutions take away your right to sue them when they defraud you.
Wells Fargo analyst William Warmington Jr has upgraded shares in Equifax to "outperform," predicting that the company will bounce back from the 30% haircut its market cap took when it was revealed that the firm committed the worst commercial data-crime in world history and then twiddled its thumbs for a couple of months before telling anyone and then allowing its CEO to resign.
It's been a whole day since we learned about another example of systematic, widespread fraud by America's largest bank Wells Fargo (ripping off small merchants with credit card fees), so it's definitely time to learn about another one: scamming mortgage borrowers out of $43/month for an unrequested and pointless "home warranty service" from American Home Shield, a billion-dollar scam-factory that considers you a customer if you throw away its junk-mail instead of ticking the "no" box and sending it back.
A class action suit against Wells Fargo alleges that the bank — which is still embroiled in a scandal over creating literally millions of fraudulent accounts and firing and blacklisting low-level employees who blew the whistle or simply refused to break the law — silently altered the mortgages of borrowers who were in bankruptcy to extend their repayment schedules by decades, so that they would pay tens — or hundreds — of thousands of extra dollars in interest.
For decades, Wells Fargo pressured its employees to commit millions of acts of fraud against its customers, using threats and blackballing to terrorize low-level employees.
Former CEO John Stumpf (a major villain in the subprime scandal) previously lost $41m out of the $200m he made overseeing a multi-year fraud that stole from 2,000,000 of the bank's customers — now he will have to repay another $28m.
Wells Fargo got caught ripping off millions of customers by setting up fake accounts in their names, then billing them for "services" related to those accounts, sometimes tanking their credit-ratings, costing them jobs, even their houses — but the company says you're not allowed to sue them because their employees fraudulently signed your name to a "binding arbitration" agreement that forces you to take your case to a fake judge whose salary they pay.
Shortly after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, the Department of Labor's whistleblower site — for Wells Fargo employees who wanted to report fraud in the ongoing scandal affecting millions of Americans — disappeared.
When you sign up for a Wells Fargo account, you're required to sign an arbitration "agreement" giving up your right to sue the company, and requiring you to have your case heard by an arbitrator paid for by — and dependent on — Wells Fargo instead.
Even though disgraced Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf has left the building, his most outrageous legal theories live on: on Wednesday, the company filed a motion in a federal court in Utah seeking dismissal of a class action suit by the customers it defrauded — the bank argues that since customers sign a binding arbitration "agreement" when they open new accounts, that the customers whose signatures were forged on fraudulent new accounts should be subject to this agreement and denied a day in court.