Originally Posted by kane

In a nutshell, here is what happened:

An executive at Wells Fargo set a high goal for the sales team when it came to selling their customers various accounts and products the bank offers. This set sales quota's for the sales staff pretty high and people were getting fired for not meeting them. At some point, the sales people figured out how they can open fake accounts under existing customers' names and they did just that, making enough fake accounts to meet to exceed their quota.

Here's one way it worked. A Wells Fargo employee would see that you have a checking account with the company but nothing else. They would then open you up a savings account and transfer the minimum needed to start that account from your checking to savings. So it might only be a few bucks. They leave the money in there and the account active for a few days then once they see they have been credited with opening the new account they would close it and put the money back in the person's checking accounts.

Eventually, it got to be so common that they started making mistakes and people were getting credit cards they never applied for or found their accounts overdrawn because money had been taken for these fake accounts etc.

During all this time the CEO of Wells Fargo and other executives with stock options benefited greatly. All these fake accounts essentially cooked the books and made investors think things were going great so the stock went up in price.

Now they are being sued by a number of people including those who were fired for not reaching a quota that many were only able to reach because they were committing fraud.