Why Is Wells Fargo in the News Again?

Photo credit: Mike Mozart, CC BY 2.0.

Today in “that was just the tip of the iceburg,” we go to the Washington Post:

Wells Fargo on Thursday announced that it had potentially opened an additional 1.4 million sham accounts customers didn’t want, 67 percent more than it initially estimated.

The revised total, 3.5 million, means that Wells Fargo employees have been opening unauthorized credit card and bank accounts for customers for far longer than the bank initially acknowledged. The eye-popping figure will hamper the San Francisco mega bank’s efforts to move beyond the nearly year-long scandal as lawmakers and regulators delve deeper into its inner workings and demand changes.

Well… that’s not good.

It gets better and/or worse: Wells Fargo admits that there could be even more fake accounts out there, but if those accounts were opened prior to 2009, it’ll be “impossible,” as Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan puts it, to find and identify them.

“The data just is not as available or as high-quality,” he said.

Those are TWO DIFFERENT THINGS, sir. I’d be willing to settle for all of the low-quality data you’ve got.

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