L.A. Prosecutor Mike Feuer filed the suit in state court on Monday, alleging that, among other things, employees would misuse customers’ confidential information, open accounts in customers’ names without authorization, often failed to close those accounts when the customers demanded it, and sometimes even took money out of authorized client accounts to pay for those unauthorized fees…
The lawsuit also claims that Wells Fargo bankers engaged in a practice known as “gaming” — opening unauthorized accounts in customers’ names, making unauthorized withdrawals from customers’ authorized accounts to pay the fees on the unauthorized ones, and reporting customers to collections and/or posting “derogatory information” in the customers’ credit reports…
Yet many consumers — from all over the country, not just California — have written reviews that sound remarkably similar to some of the allegations mentioned in Feuer’s lawsuit…
Under comments:
Frank Cole said: The banks may not like to admit it, but these kind of sales goals are a part of the daily lives of their employees. That’s why some employees took action, through petitions, during April in Minneapolis to let Wells Fargo know it’s time to change.
Today’s front-line bank workers—tellers, loan interviewers, and customer-service reps—earn far too little money to be considered “bankers” in the traditional sense of the word. And though they still collect and dispense money, their main job involves hawking credit cards and loans you probably don’t need.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/banks-forcing-low-wage-tellers-sell-financial-products
Based on union organizer interviews with hundreds of workers in the industry, Sen found that front-line bank workers often face quotas for hawking potentially exploitive financial products, often to low-income customers, even though the workers themselves barely qualify as middle class. “We can definitely see bank workers as part of the same continuum of issues facing all low-wage workers,” she says…
One HSBC bank employee, according to the study, reported that workers who failed to meet their sales goals had the difference taken out of their paychecks… A recent University of California-Berkeley study found that 31 percent of bank tellers’ families rely on public assistance at an annual cost of $900 million to taxpayers…
Banks are just another Walmart, Target, Walgreens, CVS…
All Things Chronic 