Wells Fargo is Not Doing What It Used to Do: CFPB Ordered Charge Overdrafts and Auto Loan Borrowers Refunds

Wells Fargo’s CEO Charlie Scharf said in a statement, “We and our regulators have identified a series of unacceptable practices that we have been working systematically to change and provide customer remediation where warranted.”

TheCFPB has ordered Wells Fargo to stop charging surprise overdraft fees on bank accounts and make sure auto loan borrowers get refunds for certain add-on fees.

“We and our regulators have identified a series of unacceptable practices that we have been working systematically to change and provide customer remediation where warranted,” said Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf, who took the helm in 2019 with a mission to clean up the mess left by his predecessors.

A customer who lost a car due to wrongful possession will get a base amount of $4,000 each, and may receive more money based on their particulars.

Although Wells Fargo received a positive review from the agency, it is not certain that they are making rapid enough progress and that the agency thinks that the bank has delayed needed reform.

As a refresher: Back then, the bank’s leadership was found to have pressured rank-and-file employees to aggressively push consumer products to boost sales and revenue to meet certain quotas. Employees at Wells Fargo created millions of bank accounts for customers without their knowledge.

The agency knows that the settlement does not provide immunity for individuals at Wells Fargo, which is why they won’t fix the bank’s problems.

During her final act as chair of the Fed, Janet Yellen imposed unprecedented penalties on Wells Fargo that are still in place today.

Nightcap Wells Fargo Scandals : The Case for a Closed, High-Dimensional, Big-Bang Bank

The agency said these fees are imposed when customers have money in their bank account but it is not enough to cover the transaction.

A full $2 billion of the settlement is going to be given to customers. It can hardly erase the trauma of having your car taken away or your house wrongly foreclosed on, though it is a welcome windfall.

The good news is the fraud was snuffed out and the really rich, powerful people who are responsible for it all went to jail… I’m kidding. This is the country of America. A few executives have faced charges of misleading investors, though most have settled out of court, because they’re rich and can afford to pay hefty fees (unlike many of the customers they bilked out of hard-earned cash.)

“This latest litany of lawbreaking cannot be fairly characterized or dismissed as mere ‘mismanagement,’” wrote Dennis Kelleher, CEO of the nonprofit Better Markets, calling for regulators to consider breaking up the bank. “This type of longstanding pattern and practice of illegal activities is more frequently seen in criminal enterprises, not at gigantic US banks. If a business with a record of breaking the law were open in America, it would have already been shut down.

The breakup idea would likely have support. Senator Elizabeth Warren urged the Federal Reserve to strip Wells Fargo of its financial holding company status, and to make it separate from its banking activities.

“The only way these consumers and their bank accounts can be kept safe is through another institution —one whose business model is not dependent on swindling customers for every last penny they can get,” Warren wrote in a letter to the central bank.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/20/business/nightcap-wells-fargo-scandals/index.html

Nightcap: A Nightcap Nightcap Perspective on Mastodon, 3M, Twitter and Snapchat (and a preview of Nightcap in the UK)

The past two months have seen a lot of problems with the company that has been owned by Musk. That’s been good news for its increasingly popular rival. Mastodon counted 300,000 monthly users in October. As of last month, that figure has shot up to 2.5 million — a more than 730% increase — according to its founder. Mastodon has a similar look to Twitter, and has quickly become the go-to alternative for people who are put off by Musk era of the larger social platform.

3M will stop making the “forever chemicals” that are in hundreds of household items by the end of the next decade. Recent science suggests the chemicals are much more hazardous to human health than scientists had initially thought.

The portrait of the queen, King Charles III, will be featured on new banknote in the United Kingdom. Here’s what they’ll look like.

binding restrictions on the company’s business are one of the things that the EU has agreed to impose after striking a deal with Amazon. It includes a commitment not to use third-party sellers’ data to benefit Amazon’s own marketplace listings, a practice that policymakers around the world say is anticompetitive.

Have you been enjoying Nightcap? Then you will get all of this and more in your inbox every night, as well as some of the funniest stuff we found on the internet. Most nights we believe in a four-day work week.