Rock and roll lovers of a certain vintage might readily conjure up a particular tune title to encapsulate the shifting realities that have existed for one prominent American bank in recent years.
That song is “Good Times, Bad Times” by rock colossus Led Zeppelin, and it just as assuredly applies to Wells Fargo as it does anything else that can be remotely considered.
The bank has been up, to be sure, with enviable bottom lines being reported in many past years.
And it has been down, with no greater example capable of being offered than the mere nodding of a head toward the seemingly insuperable problems the bank is confronting right now.
Those woes are truly outsized, commencing with last year’s bombshell report of massive fraud perpetrated on legions of customers paying charges for various bank offerings they never even subscribed to. As a CNN article notes, bank employees simply signed them up for extra fees and related outlays unknowingly.
Bogus account creation reportedly occurred for well over a decade. The bank is now paying a heavy price for that, with it being tasked to fork out approximately $142 million in a class action settlement to customers.
The bad times assuredly aren’t ending there, though, with one commentator noting that a “spotlight will continue to shine brightly” on the bank’s ongoing scandals.
Evidence of that comes courtesy of just-reported news that previous fraud estimates were sorely understated. CNN states that a new bank review “has uncovered up to 1.3 million more fake accounts after digging deeper into ]its] broken sales culture.”
How much more is broken? Seemingly, it will take additional probes and exacting independent analyses to find out.
