Those "heroic rogue GOP senators" just helped Trump shield Equifax and Wells Fargo from lawsuits

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.

Predictably, Wells Fargo loves Equifax and suggests investing heavily in the company

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.

24 hours later, ANOTHER massive Wells Fargo fraud scandal

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.

Wells Fargo also gouged small businesses on credit-card fees

The hits keep on coming for the largest bank in America: in addition to stealing millions with fraudulent overdraft fees, creating 2,000,000 fraudulent accounts, blackballing whistleblowers, defrauding mortgage borrowers, and stealing tens of thousands of cars with fraudulent repos, they also grossly overcharged America's struggling small businesses for processing their credit-card fees, according to a new lawsuit.

Wells Fargo also defrauded 800,000 car loan customers and stole 25,000 cars

Wells Fargo didn't just steal millions from its customers with crooked overdraft fees, didn't just create 2,000,000 fraudulent accounts and threaten to blackball employees who tried to stop the frauds; didn't just defraud broke mortgage borrowers by the bushel-load — they also defrauded 800,000 customers with car loans, forcing 274,000 of them into deliquency and "wrongfully repossessing" (that is, stealing) 25,000 of their cars.

Not just savers! Wells Fargo also defrauded bankrupt mortgage borrowers

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.

A rare class-action victory over Wells Fargo's fake accounts proves binding arbitration sucks

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.

Wells Fargo: preventing the customers we ripped off from suing us is doing them a favor

Wells Fargo admits that its employees opened more than 2,000,000 fake accounts in order to run up fraudulent charges against its customers (employees who balked at committing fraud were fired and blacklisted for life from the banking industry); it also says that the customers it stole from can't sue the company because fake account paperwork bearing their forged signatures includes a promise to enter into binding arbitration rather than suing.

Wells Fargo says that its customers gave up right to sue by having their signatures forged

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.

Senate investigates Wells Fargo retaliations against whistleblowers

One after another, ex-Wells Fargo employees have come forward to reveal that when they blew the whistle of millions of frauds committed against the bank's customers, the bank's management fired them and blackballed them from the banking industry for life, by falsifying claims of wrongdoing on a semi-secret list of corrupt bankers that is consulted by the industry before they make new hires.

Wells Fargo blackballed employees who refused to commit fraud, forcing them out of the industry forever

Earlier this month, Planet Money aired an interview with a Wells Fargo whistleblower who was fired for trying to alert the bank to the millions of criminal frauds being committed against its customers, and we learned that the whistleblower had been added to a confidential blacklist used by the finance industry, preventing her from ever getting work in the industry again.