So it turns out that Wells Fargo employees have been creating fake accounts in order to collect various fees over the past five years or so. And it wasn’t just a few employees but around 5,300 employees who have been fired for doing so.
So basically, what these people were doing was creating false checking accounts and moving customer’s money to those accounts and collecting fees for having insufficient funds and, in another egregious case, opening credit card accounts without customer knowledge. The latter being more devastating because it causes issues with your credit rating.
If this was merely a few dozen people, I would have just written this off as a bad branch. But this was well over 5,000 employees which leads me to suspect that it was systemic approach to criminal fraud. I’d wager that people within the company were encouraged to engage is this crime by their higher ups.
So what happens to the company? They are fined 183 million dollars to be placed in the coffers of the Federal government, not as a reimbursement for the customers damaged by this fraud. Of course, Wells Fargo will have to reimburse their customers on their own, only after this multi-billion dollar company pays its comparatively small fine.
If there was real justice in the banking world, the top executives of Wells Fargo would be held personally accountable, regardless of their involvement, and would subsequently be facing serious conspiracy and fraud charges in a Federal court.
But this is the world we live in. We live in a world where the banking class is protected by the various rules and regulations designed specifically to allow a criminal company such as Wells Fargo to skirt the law and when caught only get a slap on the wrist.
I’d bet if the executives at Wells Fargo were looking at real prison time, along with denied bail and being placed in general population, you’d see a lot of changes real quick in the banking industry.
But I think we will have to suffer through another, larger economic collapse before that happens. At least there’s a good chance that Donald Trump will be in power if that happens because he’s really good at declare bankruptcy and getting to the heart of the blame.