Put Them in Prison

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

02 September 17

The ugly Wells Fargo saga takes an uglier turn.

know that it's very hard to make these cases and all the other excuses we've heard why the inherently criminal class that is our financial services sector cannot be prosecuted for their various and sundry offenses. And I know that it doesn't help with the civility problem we have in our politics to call names. But you'll pardon me for saying that someone ought to bury the fcking rat bastards at Wells Fargo under the goddamn jail. From the AP:

The scope of Wells Fargo's fake accounts scandal grew significantly on Thursday, with the bank now saying that 3.5 million accounts were potentially opened without customers' permission between 2009 and 2016. That's up from 2.1 million accounts that the bank had cited in September 2016, when it acknowledged that employees under pressure to meet aggressive sales targets had opened accounts that customers might not have even been aware existed. Wells Fargo said Thursday that about half a million of the newly discovered accounts were missed during the original review, which covered the years 2011 to 2015. After Wells Fargo acknowledged the fake accounts last year, evidence quickly appeared that the sales practices problems dated back even further. So Wells Fargo hired an outside consulting firm to analyze 165 million retail bank accounts opened between 2009 and 2016. Wells said the firm found that, along with the 2.1 million accounts originally disclosed, 981,000 more accounts were found in the expanded timeline. And roughly 450,000 accounts were found in the original window.

I'm no lawyer, although I occasionally act as legal counsel in the shebeen here, but it seems to me that what we're dealing with here are 3.5 million individual acts of fraud by Wells Fargo. They opened fake accounts with the real names of their customers, and then charged those customers for the privilege of being defrauded. This seems neither difficult nor complicated. It seems to me that you'd have to transport the RICO indictment on this criminal enterprise by barge. Instead, Wells Fargo paid a $185 million fine to the regulators, and it settled a class-action suit brought by its universe of marks to the tune of $142 million. Oh, and lest we forget:

The scandal was the biggest in Wells Fargo's history. It cost then-CEO John Stumpf his job, and the bank's once-sterling industry reputation was in tatters.

I think I speak for the entire class when I say that I could care less about the bank's "once sterling reputation."

Wells Fargo said last month that roughly 570,000 customers were signed up for and billed for car insurance that they didn't need or necessarily know about. Many couldn't afford the extra costs and fell behind in their payments, and in about 20,000 cases, cars were repossessed. Other customers have filed lawsuits against Wells Fargo saying they were victims of unfair overdraft practices. Wells Fargo said Thursday that of the 3.5 million accounts potentially opened without permission, 190,000 of those incurred fees and charges. That's up from 130,000 that the bank originally said. Wells Fargo will refund $2.8 million to customers, in addition to the $3.3 million it already agreed to pay. In addition, San Francisco-based Wells admitted that 528,000 customers were likely signed up for online bill payment without authorization. It'll refund $910,000 in fees to those customers.

By the way, John Stumpf, the CEO who presided over this monumental criminal empire, walked away from his job with a get-the-fck-outta-here package of $130 million. (With an opposing view, here's a guy from Fox Business who wished everyone would leave poor John Stumpf aloooooonnnnne! After all, he did voluntarily step down, and he gave back a sum equal to nearly a third of his walkaway money, so what do you vicious citizen mobs want, anyway?) This is the way the world works. But here is a helpful comparison. When he finally got sent up for life, John Gotti oversaw a criminal enterprise was worth about $600 million. Of course, there wasn't much you could buy when you were in 23-hour lockdown at Marion. The estimated net worth of Wells Fargo in 2016, even after these revelations first came to light, was nearly $90 billion. Gotti clearly got involved with the wrong rackets.