Why Would Anyone Do Business With Wells Fargo?
Do You Really Want to Do Business With Wells Fargo?
Wells Fargo & Company is a financial services company doing business in 35 countries and has over 70 million customers. Why anyone would want to do business with them considering all the lawsuits and scandals is beyond us. Yet their offices are everywhere and continue to promote themselves.
Below you will find a list of the issues along with the compensation for the “key” people in charge for minding the store.
March 2010 - failed to monitor and report money laundering by narcotics traffickers between 2004-2007
August 2010 - fined by the United States district court for overdraft practices
February 2012 - National Mortgage Settlement required to pay $5.4 billion because of improper foreclosure practices
April 2012 - federal judge order them to pay $3.1 million in punitive damages over a single loan. They improperly charged the homeowner $24,000 in mortgage fees, after the bank misallocated payments to interest instead of principal
August 2012 - agreed to pay around $6.6 million charges that in 2007 it sold risky mortgage-backed securities without realizing their dangers
Oct 2012 - sued by United States Attorney Preet Bharara over questionable mortgage deals
April 2013 - settled a suit with 24,000 Florida homeowners because of inflating premiums on forced-place insurance.
May 2013 - paid $203 million to settle class-action litigation for excessive overdraft fees
Feb 2015 - paid $4 million in restitution for illegally taking an interest in homes of borrowers in exchange for opening credit card accounts for homeowners
2016 - agreed to pay $1.2 billion because they violated the False Claims Act by underwriting over 100,000 FHA loans when 50% of the applicants did not qualify.
Sept 2016 - paid $185 million in fines for opening over 1.5 million checking and savings accounts and 500,000 credit cards without customers consent
Nov 2016 - agreed to pay $50 million to settle allegations of overcharging hundreds of thousands of homeowners for appraisals order after they defaulted on their mortgage loans
Dec 2016 - was fined for failing to store electronic documents in a “write once rad many” format, which makes it impossible to alter to destroy records after they are written.
May 2018 - business banking group had altered documents about business clients in 2017.
June 2019 - agreed to pay $385 million for allegedly scamming millions of auto-loan customer into buying insurance they did not need.
August 2020 - paid $7.8 million in back wages for allegedly discriminating against 34, 193 African Americans in hiring tellers, personal bankers, customer sales/service representatives.
August 2020 - agreed to pay a fine of $350,00 as well as $10 million in restitution payments for failing to supervise representatives that recommended customers to invest in high-risk energy securities in 2014-2015
Dec 2022 - agreed to a settlement of $3.7 billion over abuses tied to fake account scandal
May 2023 - agreed to pay $1 billion to settle a shareholder class-action suit
There is obviously a corrupt pattern of business practices for decades, yet the fines they receive did not seem to discourage them from taking these fines seriously. The top executives were paid with ridiculous compensation amounts even though the companies overall business practices continued to be in question.
It goes beyond belief that any business no matter how big or small could get away with running their business under such a black cloud.