Thread by @doctorow

Wells Fargo is America's third-largest bank. It used to be the largest, but it committed a string of terrible frauds that it was never truly punished for (it made more from crime than it paid in fines).

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If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jub…

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Its crime spree DID result in one meaningful punishment: Wells was forced to downsize to #3, with a mere $1.77 trillion in assets.

Have no fear: @WellsFargo is down but not out, and despite its reduced stature, it is still engaged in egregious acts of fraud.

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The latest scam? "Forex transposition." Say you have an account with Wells where you get income in euros but need to spend dollars. Historically, Wells would have defrauded you with "Range of Day" pricing.

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That's where Wells converts your euros to dollars using the best rate (for Wells, AKA the worst rate for you), on the day you ordered the currency conversion. Currency prices move around a lot during the day, and this scam could easily double Wells' commission.

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But the Range of Day scam is a grift for the little people, not suited to kings of con like Wells Fargo.

Wells just paid $76m to settle a federal investigation into a much more ambitious and brazen scam.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

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As Matt Levine writes for Bloomberg, the new scam involved simply "making up prices," while maintaining plausible deniability.

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Here's how that worked: say the best Range of Day exchange rate (an already crooked number) was 1.0241. Bloomberg's forex trader would exchange your funds at 1.0421. On big trades, that could cost you hundreds of thousands - even millions of dollars.

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But you were unlikely to catch the error, and if you did, Wells's trader would just apologize and say that they transposed the digits accidentally.

As crimes go, this is pretty unambiguous. It's fraud. It made them a lot of money, and they only had to give some of it back.

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That means they'll do it again.

Of course they will! This is Wells fuckin' Fargo, we're talking about. They CANNOT STOP CRIMING.

In case you've forgotten about Wells's crime-spree (it's been a minute), here's some highlights:

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During foreclosure bonanza of the Great Financial Crisis, Wells led the pack. They literally broke into peoples' homes, stole all their worldly goods and changed the locks, all without bothering to check whether they had the right house.

theintercept.com/2015/08/28/wel…

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Around then, Wells began to pressure its low-waged, young, precarious tellers to meet quotas on new accounts opened by existing customers. Its managers taught tellers how to fraudulently open these accounts. 2,000,000 customers were affected.

consumerfinance.gov/about-us/blog/…

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These new accounts racked up millions in fees and penalties. Victims' credit scores were tanked, costing them mortgages, access to student loans, and jobs. The executive who ran the program was given a $125m bonus.

nakedcapitalism.com/2016/09/wells-…

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The CEO - who took a $200m bonus himself - blamed low-level employees for the crimes. What he didn't say was that low-level employees who blew the whistle on the scam were illegally fired.

money.cnn.com/2016/09/21/inv…

They fired a LOT of whistleblowers.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

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They didn't just fire kids for blowing the whistle - they ruined them. After Wells fired a whistleblower, they'd add them to an industry database of bankers who'd been fired for doing crimes - people on that list can never work in the industry again.

npr.org/sections/thetw…

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Eventually, John Stumpf, the CEO who oversaw the crimes, resigned. The Wells board appointed a successor who insisted that the bank had no problems with its culture.

consumerist.com/2016/10/13/new…

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Naturally, some customers who'd been stolen from sued. Wells asked a judge to throw out the case, because those customers signed away their right to sue when a Wells Fargo employee forged their signature on the paperwork to open a fraudulent account.

reuters.com/article/us-wel…

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The judge agreed.

nytimes.com/2016/12/06/bus…

Trump also liked Wells Fargo (he owed them a lot of money). Shortly after he took office, the Department of Labor's site for Wells whistleblowers vanished.

nypost.com/2017/01/27/whi…

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Wells Fargo's got great timing. During the Trump years, so many of its scandals came to light - and were never seriously punished by Trump's DOJ or regulators.

They stole millions with fraudulent "home warranties":

theintercept.com/2017/08/12/the…

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They stole millions by ripping off small businesses with fake credit-card fees:

consumerist.com/2017/08/11/wel…

They defrauded 800,000 car insurance customers and stole ("improperly repossessed") 25,000 cars:

nytimes.com/2017/07/27/bus…

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They tricked people who sought mortgage refinancing into scam packages that looked good at first, but led to waves of defaults and foreclosures:

nytimes.com/2017/06/14/bus…

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When Wells FINALLY admitted it ripped off 2m customers with fake accounts and offered to pay them back, it created an OPT-IN repayment system, ensuring that most of its victims would never be made whole:

nakedcapitalism.com/2018/02/wells-…

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The Trump #taxscam only emboldened the company: after having its taxes slashed, Wells cut 26,500 jobs, shuttered branches across the country, and firehosed money over its shareholders with a $40.6 BILLION buyback.

rooseveltinstitute.org/2018/11/07/wha…

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Not all the shareholders were satisfied. Some of them sued because the company had not delivered on its promises to "restore trust" in the bank. The company's defense? "Everyone knows we're liars, so they shouldn't have relied on our statements."

latimes.com/business/hiltz…

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I mean, they have a point. It was only months later when the company blamed a "computer glitch" for its theft of 525 homes from people who should not have faced foreclosure.

cbsnews.com/news/wells-far…

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There's no such thing as a non-sociopathic giant bank, but even in the crowded field of crime-addicted financial firms, Wells Fargo stands out. The fact that they've paid $76m - instead of having their execs go to prison - means they'll do it again.

And again.

And again.

eof/