Reminder that Wells Fargo was caught opening millions of accounts without permission. This company should not be trusted with anything.
One of the rare cases where a company actually paid a huge $3 billion settlement.
It hardly made a dent, though.
Totally. It wasn’t close to being enough. The entire board should have been arrested for fraud, at the very least. At least it wasn’t some laughably low amount like we’re used to, I’m surprised it was even this high.
I really wish we’d start prosecuting and imprisoning leadership boards for really anything the company does wrong. It’s really amazing the way we let companies just get away with every single thing, I mean how much more predictable could the slide to shittiness be?
Damn straight.
This is exactly why fees would be revenue based. A flat 1% of annual revenue per offense would very quickly get that shit to stop.
I was looking for this comment. ALL fines should run as a percentage of annual income or profits. This includes traffic tickets and other fines.
Didn’t a country do speeding tickets as a percent of income?
Just an operating cost.
3B is peanuts to them. I want to see fines that cripple a company’s yearly profits so that, in lieu of criminal investigations and repercussions, the execs at the very least get punished by their board of directors and shareholders. There’s only one language they understand. Another poster called it “operating costs”. That’s what we need to get rid of; punitive fines need to regain their punitive nature in order to be anywhere close to effective.
Needs executive jail time of 1 year per million dollars too.
No doubt. If fines and settlements are all we can muster, then there needs to be real personal consequences for those responsible as well as the corporation taking responsibility. Until we fully decouple money and politics, I have a hard time imagining that kind of proportionate punishment ever being doled out.
Yep if there was any justice in the world this would have put Wells Fargo deep in the ground but fucking no
Seriously. There’s no reasonable argument that they should have been allowed to continue to exist after that.
This is true. At the time it sounded so serious. Hand slaps and finger wags. It’s totally ok to cheat steal and lie if you are rich. Rules don’t apply to you. It’s completely mad.
And was banned from doing business in California
I was one of those millions. Cost me way more than I got back in the settlement. Wells Fargo is a criminal organization.
Fuck, I’m sorry that happened to you. It’s ridiculous that every victim of their fraud wasn’t at least made whole, but in addition to the people who should have gone to prison, you and all their victims honestly should have been given a modest fortune as proper restitution for these crimes.
We should do an uno reverse and nationalize wells fargo.
Musk would just learn from them and open a bunch of bank accounts for everyone in the USA and have him control them all.
Seriously FUCK these guys who think everything should be run like a business
This sounds like a scheme hatched in 1887.
Right? I thought this was a side plot in The Music Man
Wells Fargo are thieves who steal from their customers. If you use them, you’re about 15 years delayed in getting out. Security issue.
I had a teller LITERALLY try to steal money from me.
A number of years back I was depositing cash from doing some side-hustle party entertainment work, I counted the cash, handed the cash to the teller and he counted it off, and it was short $100.
The thing was, I was doing magic tricks at parties, I had taught myself a bunch of very basic card tricks and slight-of-hand, not amazing but well enough to impress grade-schoolers, so I caught when the teller did a thing with his hands as he counted, he seemed to palm a bill and I felt immediate unease and wasn’t sure what to do, so I called the manager over and my partner and got the attention of another teller, I figured if I got enough people around he couldn’t pull any further tricks. I said we were “missing” a 100-dollar bill, and the teller acted really confused, pretended to look everywhere, then suddenly the missing bill “appeared” in his drawer. I let it go because I just wanted to go home.
I can even forgive that, that’s one person, not an entire institution. I wouldn’t have a gripe with Wells Fargo if that was all that ever happened. But they did things later on in my life like when I rented a car, they sent me on an overdraft-fee spiral that made my account -$5000 by the time I called the bank. They undid the erroneous charges after lots of shouting.
Later on, I had no choice but to finance a vehicle through WF, I will save the whole, long, horrible story and the shouting matches, but to give an idea how bad-faith they are, they fucking REFUNDED ME THE ENTIRE CAR with a series of “apology checks” over a period of three years after they repossessed it wrongly.
The only reason I didn’t lose tens of thousands of dollars to Wells Fargo is because I learned to fight, fight and scream and yell when they tried to scam me. This shouldn’t be on the customer to be aggressive and angry just to guarantee normal business.
Who more qualified than a company that is banned from doing business in some parts of the US due to being caught defrauding customers?
It’s gone so well for us in the UK, I can’t imagine the entire organisation being asset stripped and then held for random at the taxpayer’s expense.
WELLS FARGO??
If I was put in charge of a privatized Post Office I 'd start by stopping regular mail service and focus on packages. Just not profitable enough.
Thank you for articulating one of the many reasons that it should not be privatized.
Some things -and I know this is wild- do not need to be profitable! Courts, fire departments, schools… There are segments of a functioning society that have nothing to do with making money! I know it sounds Cuckoo bananas and like some woke Marxist shit but those beloved Founding Fathers they talk about on Fox News wrote about weird ideas like “Common Defense” and “General Welfare” and “Pursuit of Happiness” Not so much on profitability.
They want to privatize schools too. They are morons whom probably drank to much lead as kids.
These are the folks that don’t understand King Midas is a cautionary tale.
The Gilded Age 2 Electric Boogaloo
Profit shouldn’t be the point
