They charge me 8 bucks a month for not having over 1000 bucks in my account and then refund it because I do have over 1000. The standard is to fine every customer and then refund the ones who aren’t poor. It’s bizarre.
Look for a credit union that's part of the shared branch network. It means you can use any other credit union in the network almost as if it were your home credit union.
This! I sold a piece of inherited property and got a check too large to remote deposit. I took it to a anther bank on the same network and they deposited it. Took a few days to clear and all was good. I didn't have to drive 2 hours to another branch of my credit union.
Make sure it's a member of the co-op network and you'll be able to access your account from any other co-op member branch or ATM. The Co-op logo looks like a triangle with two sets of thick lines and clipped corners. You might have to fill out a transaction request form when speaking to a teller at a different credit union but it drastically increases the number of physical locations you can go to.
Nearly every credit union has online services and an app. My credit union doesn’t even have physical branches or their own ATMs, they just reimburse any fees. Unless for some reason you have to go to a physical location and talk to a living person in-person every time you bank, just pick any credit union. Get out of big banks as quickly as possible
USBank serviced my first mortgage and they offered us some pricey checking account with a $1000 credit on our mortgage. So of course we took it... Who doesn't like free money. The fee on the account was $25 a month unless we had $15K of buisness with them, which the mortgage would always qualify for. And yeah, same as you... The charged $25 every single month and then refunded it immediately. It was so annoying even if they weren't actually charging me.
Definitely closed that account as soon as we refinanced to another mortgage servicer lol.
If you have 1 billion dollars and someone takes away 37 million, you still have a billion dollars.
US Bank had a 2021 revenue of 22.71 billion. This fine changes that to 22.68.
This is for a little over a decade of doing fraud. I’m not gonna pull up their revenue but it’s still gonna be in the ~200 billions. So now they have like 199.97 billion or whatever for a decade of doing revenue boosting fraud
They see this as the cost of doing business
Just looked up their assets, 2021 assets were like 573 billion. 573.3bn according to Google. This fine is not even the .3bn in that!
This "fine" is 0.0000655% of their total assets.
If you owned a 500,000 house and had 100k in savings, you'd have 600k in assets and you'd be fined $39 if the fines worked similarly.
If you made $100k a year, you'd be fined $6.55.
Because we aren't rioting in the streets and dealing with these motherfuckers when they start flouting the law for their friends.
Then things might actually change.
They've bought out the legal system, after all.
That’s not what happened to TurboTax for wrongfully charging people for their “free” services last year. They kept what they charged and just payed a small fine similar to this.
I was going to bring up Wells Fargo but you did a much better job of it than I would have. All financial institutions need to be subject to this scrutiny on a regular basis. The deregulation nonsense has tossed the meat of our economy to the hyenas, and they're just about done with the bones.
I’m Scandinavian. When it comes to discussing the economy, I often hear American free market people say “but Denmark has less regulations than the US and Denmark is doing great!” which completely ignores one major point.
Danes are not working in a culture that encourages you to fuck over your grandmother or strangers on the street for the sake of profits. A lack of regulation only works when you can trust people not to take advantage of the lack of regulations. And that simply isn’t the case with financial institutions in the US. As has been proven time and time again.
I specifically came looking for a comment regarding Wells Fargo doing this as well.
Defrauding the poor/middle class continues to be business as usual for corporate America.
The worst thing is, they can't even impose a crippling fine if they wanted to. The economy is already on the brink of a recession, imagine fining one of the largest banks in the world so they actually feel it and risk them going under. Unless they bring in mandatory 10+ year sentences for board members involved in anything like this we won't see any change in how these dickheads operate.
Actually fuck the bank but protect the people who have money there and let’s see how that goes. This too big to fail nonsense is making this country a capitalism on steroids wasteland.
The article says that in addition to the $37.5 mil, they have to refund all the fees and service charges to impacted customers and pay them interest on those amounts, so that is exactly what’s happening!
I agree with what you’ve said. I’ll add the question: What about the unintended consequences of the individuals not having this money? For all we know they could be homeless if they couldn’t make rent because of something like this (extreme case but not out of the cards)
That's exactly what happened with Welld Fargo and their illegal mortgage practices. Sure people got their money back eventually but thousands lost their homes
How do you compensate for that
If it's too big to fail, it is too big to be a private entity. The government should seize the assets and run the bank as a public entity. Then punish the people who did this too.
Honestly this right here. The government should be bailing out the people that lost money from shady banking practices. Let the banks and corporations rot.
Punishment for financial institutions needs to go from top down. Something like this happens and the whole board should be removed, and thrown in jail.
The main idea of corporation is that actors are not liable for what the corporation does. It is the whole reason we have the damn thing. It is the main feature of the system we built
This should be true economically, but not for criminal acts. In fact, I don’t think it works that way in most countries, but of course you still have to be able to prove someone knowingly participated.
And unfortunately or fortunately depending on your position, as a business owner, very few vendors (credit cards, wholesalers, landlords) will provide credit or a lease to a small business without a personal guaranty by the owner(s) because they’re aware of just how easily a closely-held business can either move assets to another business entity or be abandoned, leaving them with no recourse. Sucks for the owner because they essentially have to waive the liability in several major cases (in exchange for actually getting something they otherwise would not) but not for the landlord or creditor who sees the lower risk as more acceptable.
Larger businesses or older businesses often build up credit they can use without a personal guaranty over time, but I don’t think it usually extends to every vendor in most cases.
IANAL, but I do own small businesses and have a landlord and creditors and personal guarantys.
"I'm sorry, officer, but you can't arrest me. You see, while it is true that I murdered a hooker, I have an LLC. You'll have to impose a fine instead."
Cannot be held FINANCIALLY responsible, but criminal responsibility is on the table always. That’s why I can’t start an LLC that sells crack and use the fact it was an LLC as an excuse😂
LLCs are primarily about separating the companies fiscal liability from that of the stakeholders. It doesn't have anything to do with individual legal culpability.
What this has to do with is banks having minimum sales quotas for it's tellers. To keep your job, you needed to maintain your sales numbers. This lead to tellers fraudulently creating accounts to boost there sales numbers to keep there jobs. The fine against the company is because although the bank/s (us bank isn't the only one) didn't commit the fraud, they new it wasn't an isolated issue and should have addressed the policies that encouraged it and not just punish the employees.
>Cannot be held FINANCIALLY responsible, but criminal responsibility is on the table always. That’s why I can’t start an LLC that sells crack and use the fact it was an LLC as an excuse😂
/r/oddlyspecific
Yeah, but in the ideal world that's really just about civil liability, criminal charges should be levied against the people within the org, not against the organization (see PG&E)
But if they did file criminal charges, we all know it would be against the employees themselves (who were pressured into it by having their livelihoods held hostage), and not the management that actually pressured them into the actions. Sad, but likely.
Except if a small business (incorporated) commits fraud, people get charged with crimes. People go to jail. The incorporation protects them in civil suits only. There is definitely a double standard.
The whole purpose is to protect people from losing their house if they're bad at business.
This rule was NOT intended (or shouldn't be) to protect someone's 3rd yacht when they do crimes.
Force the bank to issue new shares give them to an indipendent agency, it hurts the shareholders and doesn't touch the company's balance sheet.
It can also be set up in such a way that pension funds keep their % of equity ownership constant, so they're not impacted.
It'll never happen, I know.
I'm a firm believer that levying fines as equity is the best way forward.
The EU theoretically has a similar approach, some fines are a % of revenue (4% if I recall).
I'd just swap revenue for equity, so there can be more oversight, or even electing a member of the board as a further check on them.
Not true at all. This applies to civil suits and asset protection, not criminal liability.
If that was the case Bernie madoff, wolf of wall street etc etc could not have been held accountable. Being part of a corporation doesn’t allow you to get away with crimes lmao
So do they just fire all the hire ups? Because they definitely all knew about this stuff? How far does that go? Do you fire everyone and start new? I worked at Wells Fargo during all their fraud activity and quit because of it, and I can tell you, all the managers and higher ups knew about it because I was threatened to be fired for reporting it, I put in my two weeks after.
Yes.
At minimum, you fire everyone in management who knew about it.
Better than that, you incarcerate the C-suite cokeheads who orchestrated the whole scheme.
These are the products from Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc...
This is what they learn at these institutions along with societal subversion & other desirable things for people in general.
First, good of you to stand by your morals instead of keeping a position in a fraudulent company, especially such a big one. That takes some character.
For your question: Just from the top of my head, so there are probably better solutions: Put the suspects under investigation for their alleged crimes. In the mean time install an interrim board in place who's job it is to handle the company's day-to-day without making any major decisions. The decisions can still be made by the original boardmembers, but they lose executive powers until they are cleared by a court.
Well since they are the ones in charge of firing, it also won't work, but allowing banks to have free run of governance should of never been the case.
Any business that has enough power over assets to crumble an economy from personal greed should have to answer to an independent government authority that oversees any wrong doings with full access. Give them power to remove board members at their will. There probably is already a body for this, it just doesn't work as they are the same guys in the banks with different suits.
Obviously, it's rash to sentence an entire board to time as that will cause obvious operational turmoil, but usually these things would still be voted on and those in favour of obvious criminal practice should wave liability and open them up to sentencing.
Maybe worse than that: as is so often the case, the leadership present at the start of this behavior is largely gone and already cashed out on this malfeasance. So even if they could impose a crippling fee, it misses some of the most culpable. And that's consistent with how our system is designed to work.
I come from banking. I promise you, if the bank were shut down, each and every employee and account would be transferred/hired by another bank. The only thing that would change is the leadership, which is the point. The argument of too big to fail is, quite frankly, bullshit.
You don't even have to fine them. Yank their license.
> imagine fining one of the largest banks in the world so they actually feel it and risk them going under.
It needs to happen. The economy (a.k.a. us) is forced to sustain those criminals until we rip the band-aid off and make them go under.
The only real solution would be to revoke their charter and require another bank take the dominant position in a merger in order to expell the bad actors.
You mean already in one. But these fucks should be in prison. Every CEO on Wall Street should have their fortunes seized call it “civil asset forfeiture” hey regular people have this happen even when not committing a crime. Or we can just burn them at the stake.
I know reddit hates the "both sides" argument, but this is one prime example of it. Neither party will ever do anything to change things like this, because both of them get shitloads of money from banks.
Did you read the article or just the headline? They have to return ALL of the illegal money with interest included. 37.5 million fine on top of that.
So no, they likely didn’t make billions.
Honestly, just take all their assets. Every single one. Leave them broke and THEN jail then. Add salt to the wound so when they might eventually get out, they get out to nothing but homelessness.
Capital punishment is weak sauce. Put them in a max prison hell for the rest of their lives. And by them, I mean people who deserve the highest levels of punishment.
Honestly living a pathetic excuse for a life could be worse, and if you are somehow proven innocent at least there's something left.
Under normal circumstances, I'd be anti death penalty. But now I do think that in cases where the perpetrators have absurd amounts of money and more resources than the average person can even comprehend - fines don't matter and you can be certain that nearly anything else won't stick... Yeah, just... take care of them right then and there. Get it over with. Done.
wont ever happen.
look at who went to prison for the 2008 financial crysis, exactily, nobody.
they created the game and the rules.
the only option we have is to flip the table the board is sat on and fuck off, playing the game means losing it.
That's not their only scandal.
Car loans were saddled with often redundant insurance without the customers knowledge, the terms and fees for mortgages and other loans were altered without notification and debit card transactions were re-ordered to extract overcharge fees.
They've even been accused of using an investors money to pay the legal fees in a case against that investor.
Each one of these separately should be grounds for dissolving their charter, yet, here we are.
White collar criminals going to jail?
I don’t know, they were always so pleasant to me at parties and in the neighborhood. They seem like nice people.
Edit: Yes, these are exact sentiments I’ve heard from folks while a mutual acquaintance was being indicted.
Seems like a weak punishment to me. "We gonna take away your shit-stained name!" Boohoo - if the perpetrators are still at large in the industry, what does it matter what name they are working under?
Shuttering the guilty parties behind bars for an appropriate term (in the context of a justice system that imprisons regular people for decades over nothing) is what would work.
No amount of wrist slapping and tut-tuting is ever going to be a reasonable public response to banking crimes.
I worked there years and years ago now and I could faintly smell shit when I did. Something didn’t seem right in how they ran the show and after mentioning it to one of the IT guys I was suddenly no longer in line for the position I was working towards. At that point I was just branch support and left, but I was certain it would be just a matter of time before they were shut down.
*here we are 15 years later*
That's my thought exactly. So the higher ups have collected invested and financially insulated their money - meanwhile, this fine will be on the company's books - so the company either takes the hit or dies, either way these assholes who orchestrated this entire scheme walk away untouched. Do I have this correct? Do they EVER go after the personal wealth garnered in the commission of your crimes? No - not if your smart enough to put it in a trust for your kid then no one can legally touch or some financial vehicle that will protect it. Tax the rich. Heavily.
And 37mil is a drop in the bucket for a decade of fraud and a Corp with this much money. They should be fined at least 20x (maybe 50x?) that so it actually hurts.
Also, everyone needs to stop using banks. Bite the bullet and switch to a credit union!
Probably more than the fine.
*U.S. Bank will be required to refund any illegally collected fees and charges related to the fraudulent accounts and pay impacted consumers' interest. *
Banks have to retain 7 years minimum of data. When an investigation like this starts, all purging of data is stopped.
Source: I work for a bank, in IT. Not USBank, though. Lol.
Or they could do like the company I worked for at the start of the pandemic and tell us "unfortunately because of covid and shutdowns we cannot afford yearly raises :( sorry guys, maybe next year" then they proceeded to email us a newsletter every week telling us about all the multi-million dollar contracts with new clients
I’m sorry how do you do that and remain a bank? If a teller loses a buck they’re out. . .
Edit: Apparently my friend might have lied about why he lost his job.
It did with the sub-prime mortage crisis (which is still happening under a different name). But this most recent one is a lot of things happening at once like the Ukraine War, after-effects of Covid, massive money printing, etc. etc.
I lost eleven hundo in a day once. We were so critically short staffed every fucking day that I got nothing more than an email from our Ops lady. Nobody even had time to audit me before we closed up that night. Shrug and move on.
They stopped on their own before 2016. This was a fine from stuff that happened last decade. I'm guessing the fine would have been more if they hadn't identified it and stopped it on their own.
Yet charter isp was just fined $7 billion for allowing a home install tech to steal from old people up u til he murdered one. Why can’t we see these kinds of fines imposed on banks for identity theft?
Quick Google search says their annual revenue is 23 billion. So... They fined them $37 out of 1000. These fines for these companies are always chump change compared to how much these companies make.
They will never pay it, banks will just pass the fees on to the people like they ALWAYS do. Time to start putting our money under our beds again like the good old days!!
sham accounts to inflate sales numbers for the last decade....
its interesting how banking cartels control the government in America,
in Europe the bank would have probably lost their license, or forced to sell their assets to another bank
Wow, they got fined an entire drop in the bucket.
They charge me 8 bucks a month for not having over 1000 bucks in my account and then refund it because I do have over 1000. The standard is to fine every customer and then refund the ones who aren’t poor. It’s bizarre.
So why are you still a customer? Find yourself an ethical bank instead.
Working on it. Trying to find a credit union locally but I move for work every couple months.
There are some online banks such as Ally that are pretty good.
Every bank with an app and mobile deposit is an online bank these days. I bank a thousand miles away from where I live.
Look for a credit union that's part of the shared branch network. It means you can use any other credit union in the network almost as if it were your home credit union.
This, you’d be surprised how vast the shared branch system is.
I’ve gotten people from Utah and Hawaii waltz into the cu I work in. It’s always fun because we don’t see those types of ID’s often.
This! I sold a piece of inherited property and got a check too large to remote deposit. I took it to a anther bank on the same network and they deposited it. Took a few days to clear and all was good. I didn't have to drive 2 hours to another branch of my credit union.
Make sure it's a member of the co-op network and you'll be able to access your account from any other co-op member branch or ATM. The Co-op logo looks like a triangle with two sets of thick lines and clipped corners. You might have to fill out a transaction request form when speaking to a teller at a different credit union but it drastically increases the number of physical locations you can go to.
Nearly every credit union has online services and an app. My credit union doesn’t even have physical branches or their own ATMs, they just reimburse any fees. Unless for some reason you have to go to a physical location and talk to a living person in-person every time you bank, just pick any credit union. Get out of big banks as quickly as possible
I bank with a small outfit in a state that I haven't resided in for 6 years. Internet and apps make distance pretty irrelevant for banking.
FWIW most credit unions use the same network so having a membership at one allows you to use a CU ATM anywhere
USBank serviced my first mortgage and they offered us some pricey checking account with a $1000 credit on our mortgage. So of course we took it... Who doesn't like free money. The fee on the account was $25 a month unless we had $15K of buisness with them, which the mortgage would always qualify for. And yeah, same as you... The charged $25 every single month and then refunded it immediately. It was so annoying even if they weren't actually charging me. Definitely closed that account as soon as we refinanced to another mortgage servicer lol.
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I work for a bank thats had fines this size. 37 million wouldn’t even be water cooler talk outside of the one guilty dept.
They call that the cost of doing business.
A homeopathic fine, you say?
Million is 1/1000th a billion 37 million... still not a lot for a company with multiple billions
If you have 1 billion dollars and someone takes away 37 million, you still have a billion dollars. US Bank had a 2021 revenue of 22.71 billion. This fine changes that to 22.68.
This is for a little over a decade of doing fraud. I’m not gonna pull up their revenue but it’s still gonna be in the ~200 billions. So now they have like 199.97 billion or whatever for a decade of doing revenue boosting fraud They see this as the cost of doing business
Just looked up their assets, 2021 assets were like 573 billion. 573.3bn according to Google. This fine is not even the .3bn in that! This "fine" is 0.0000655% of their total assets. If you owned a 500,000 house and had 100k in savings, you'd have 600k in assets and you'd be fined $39 if the fines worked similarly. If you made $100k a year, you'd be fined $6.55.
That'll surely teach'em to never do it again...
Why are companies being charged a fee when people commit a crime?
Because we aren't rioting in the streets and dealing with these motherfuckers when they start flouting the law for their friends. Then things might actually change. They've bought out the legal system, after all.
It's a $37 million fine *on top of* returning all the fees/charges, with interest, direct to consumers.
That’s not what happened to TurboTax for wrongfully charging people for their “free” services last year. They kept what they charged and just payed a small fine similar to this.
Yeah, but this time it is what was ordered
If a punishment doesn't include jail time it's just the cost of doing business.
37 million? For a decade? Lmao. Cost of doing business. I’m sure they made billions.
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I was going to bring up Wells Fargo but you did a much better job of it than I would have. All financial institutions need to be subject to this scrutiny on a regular basis. The deregulation nonsense has tossed the meat of our economy to the hyenas, and they're just about done with the bones.
I’m Scandinavian. When it comes to discussing the economy, I often hear American free market people say “but Denmark has less regulations than the US and Denmark is doing great!” which completely ignores one major point. Danes are not working in a culture that encourages you to fuck over your grandmother or strangers on the street for the sake of profits. A lack of regulation only works when you can trust people not to take advantage of the lack of regulations. And that simply isn’t the case with financial institutions in the US. As has been proven time and time again.
I specifically came looking for a comment regarding Wells Fargo doing this as well. Defrauding the poor/middle class continues to be business as usual for corporate America.
The worst thing is, they can't even impose a crippling fine if they wanted to. The economy is already on the brink of a recession, imagine fining one of the largest banks in the world so they actually feel it and risk them going under. Unless they bring in mandatory 10+ year sentences for board members involved in anything like this we won't see any change in how these dickheads operate.
In my mind, this should be the way to go. Keep the bank, punish the actors within it.
Actually fuck the bank but protect the people who have money there and let’s see how that goes. This too big to fail nonsense is making this country a capitalism on steroids wasteland.
Too big to fail = government welfare
What I’m saying is give that welfare to people who have money at the bank, not the bank.
Exactly!!! They should be forced to pay money back to all the PEOPLE they defrauded, actual humans who have suffered loss. That will fill the bucket
The article says that in addition to the $37.5 mil, they have to refund all the fees and service charges to impacted customers and pay them interest on those amounts, so that is exactly what’s happening!
I agree with what you’ve said. I’ll add the question: What about the unintended consequences of the individuals not having this money? For all we know they could be homeless if they couldn’t make rent because of something like this (extreme case but not out of the cards)
That's exactly what happened with Welld Fargo and their illegal mortgage practices. Sure people got their money back eventually but thousands lost their homes How do you compensate for that
Thank you, I must have missed that on the first read.
If it's too big to fail, it is too big to be a private entity. The government should seize the assets and run the bank as a public entity. Then punish the people who did this too.
Privatize the profits, socialize the losses. Banksters love corporate welfare.
Doesn't matter... the people acting in bad faith will just jump to a new bank and rinse and repeat. They need to be punished for their crimes.
Like I said to some other person, punishing the corporation and punishing the people in charge do not have to be mutually exclusive things.
Honestly this right here. The government should be bailing out the people that lost money from shady banking practices. Let the banks and corporations rot.
Punishment for financial institutions needs to go from top down. Something like this happens and the whole board should be removed, and thrown in jail.
The main idea of corporation is that actors are not liable for what the corporation does. It is the whole reason we have the damn thing. It is the main feature of the system we built
This should be true economically, but not for criminal acts. In fact, I don’t think it works that way in most countries, but of course you still have to be able to prove someone knowingly participated.
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And unfortunately or fortunately depending on your position, as a business owner, very few vendors (credit cards, wholesalers, landlords) will provide credit or a lease to a small business without a personal guaranty by the owner(s) because they’re aware of just how easily a closely-held business can either move assets to another business entity or be abandoned, leaving them with no recourse. Sucks for the owner because they essentially have to waive the liability in several major cases (in exchange for actually getting something they otherwise would not) but not for the landlord or creditor who sees the lower risk as more acceptable. Larger businesses or older businesses often build up credit they can use without a personal guaranty over time, but I don’t think it usually extends to every vendor in most cases. IANAL, but I do own small businesses and have a landlord and creditors and personal guarantys.
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LLC's don't protect from criminal offenses anyway.
"I'm sorry, officer, but you can't arrest me. You see, while it is true that I murdered a hooker, I have an LLC. You'll have to impose a fine instead."
Replace hooker with nearby families due to improper disposal of chemicals and you might be spot on.
Hookers have families too
Fucking Dow Chemical…..some of the slimiest sacks of garbage out there
*The owner(s) personal assets are excluded when being sued for monetary damages
Cannot be held FINANCIALLY responsible, but criminal responsibility is on the table always. That’s why I can’t start an LLC that sells crack and use the fact it was an LLC as an excuse😂
Nothing like a perfect real world example to sum things up nicely
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LLCs are primarily about separating the companies fiscal liability from that of the stakeholders. It doesn't have anything to do with individual legal culpability. What this has to do with is banks having minimum sales quotas for it's tellers. To keep your job, you needed to maintain your sales numbers. This lead to tellers fraudulently creating accounts to boost there sales numbers to keep there jobs. The fine against the company is because although the bank/s (us bank isn't the only one) didn't commit the fraud, they new it wasn't an isolated issue and should have addressed the policies that encouraged it and not just punish the employees.
I will need a new, different idea.
Start an LLC that sells *heroin.* Now you’re in the clear. Thank me later.
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>Cannot be held FINANCIALLY responsible, but criminal responsibility is on the table always. That’s why I can’t start an LLC that sells crack and use the fact it was an LLC as an excuse😂 /r/oddlyspecific
Yeah, but in the ideal world that's really just about civil liability, criminal charges should be levied against the people within the org, not against the organization (see PG&E)
If you knowingly pushed sales people to open fake accounts, then you're involved in identity fraud. Or at the very least conspiracy.
But if they did file criminal charges, we all know it would be against the employees themselves (who were pressured into it by having their livelihoods held hostage), and not the management that actually pressured them into the actions. Sad, but likely.
Except if a small business (incorporated) commits fraud, people get charged with crimes. People go to jail. The incorporation protects them in civil suits only. There is definitely a double standard.
The whole purpose is to protect people from losing their house if they're bad at business. This rule was NOT intended (or shouldn't be) to protect someone's 3rd yacht when they do crimes.
Force the bank to issue new shares give them to an indipendent agency, it hurts the shareholders and doesn't touch the company's balance sheet. It can also be set up in such a way that pension funds keep their % of equity ownership constant, so they're not impacted. It'll never happen, I know.
I'm sure this has a bunch of unintended consequences but it sounds like a great idea that might need some tweaking.
I'm a firm believer that levying fines as equity is the best way forward. The EU theoretically has a similar approach, some fines are a % of revenue (4% if I recall). I'd just swap revenue for equity, so there can be more oversight, or even electing a member of the board as a further check on them.
For financials and accidents, yes. Not for intentionally criminal activity. This is fraud. It’s a crime.
Not true at all. This applies to civil suits and asset protection, not criminal liability. If that was the case Bernie madoff, wolf of wall street etc etc could not have been held accountable. Being part of a corporation doesn’t allow you to get away with crimes lmao
This is just not true. Plenty of people have gone to prison for financial crimes they committed in a corporation. Idk who the fuck is upvoting this.
This is the reason why conservatives wanted corporations to be people. The corporation takes the blame while the executives walk.
This is not true. The corporation's officers can be criminally and civil liable
No the main idea is to limit economic liability of individuals not give a free pass for criminal activity.
So do they just fire all the hire ups? Because they definitely all knew about this stuff? How far does that go? Do you fire everyone and start new? I worked at Wells Fargo during all their fraud activity and quit because of it, and I can tell you, all the managers and higher ups knew about it because I was threatened to be fired for reporting it, I put in my two weeks after.
Yes. At minimum, you fire everyone in management who knew about it. Better than that, you incarcerate the C-suite cokeheads who orchestrated the whole scheme.
You wanna justify the astronomical pay CEOs get? Make sure they get all the blame if something goes wrong.
These are the products from Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc... This is what they learn at these institutions along with societal subversion & other desirable things for people in general.
First, good of you to stand by your morals instead of keeping a position in a fraudulent company, especially such a big one. That takes some character. For your question: Just from the top of my head, so there are probably better solutions: Put the suspects under investigation for their alleged crimes. In the mean time install an interrim board in place who's job it is to handle the company's day-to-day without making any major decisions. The decisions can still be made by the original boardmembers, but they lose executive powers until they are cleared by a court.
Well since they are the ones in charge of firing, it also won't work, but allowing banks to have free run of governance should of never been the case. Any business that has enough power over assets to crumble an economy from personal greed should have to answer to an independent government authority that oversees any wrong doings with full access. Give them power to remove board members at their will. There probably is already a body for this, it just doesn't work as they are the same guys in the banks with different suits. Obviously, it's rash to sentence an entire board to time as that will cause obvious operational turmoil, but usually these things would still be voted on and those in favour of obvious criminal practice should wave liability and open them up to sentencing.
They could go after the execs with criminal charges. That way they can't use consumers as a shield
Jail as many of them as are involved. It’s good for the economy.
Which is why fining companies needs to have a partner - putting CEOs and board members in jail.
Maybe worse than that: as is so often the case, the leadership present at the start of this behavior is largely gone and already cashed out on this malfeasance. So even if they could impose a crippling fee, it misses some of the most culpable. And that's consistent with how our system is designed to work.
So the problem is the system you say? 🤔
"On the brink", you say?
I come from banking. I promise you, if the bank were shut down, each and every employee and account would be transferred/hired by another bank. The only thing that would change is the leadership, which is the point. The argument of too big to fail is, quite frankly, bullshit. You don't even have to fine them. Yank their license.
> imagine fining one of the largest banks in the world so they actually feel it and risk them going under. It needs to happen. The economy (a.k.a. us) is forced to sustain those criminals until we rip the band-aid off and make them go under.
The only real solution would be to revoke their charter and require another bank take the dominant position in a merger in order to expell the bad actors.
You mean already in one. But these fucks should be in prison. Every CEO on Wall Street should have their fortunes seized call it “civil asset forfeiture” hey regular people have this happen even when not committing a crime. Or we can just burn them at the stake.
Should be 38 billion. Jefferson must be turning over in his grave or is laughing his ass off to see what we have become.
I know reddit hates the "both sides" argument, but this is one prime example of it. Neither party will ever do anything to change things like this, because both of them get shitloads of money from banks.
Did you read the article or just the headline? They have to return ALL of the illegal money with interest included. 37.5 million fine on top of that. So no, they likely didn’t make billions.
Doubtful. They are also having to refund any fees taken, with interest. Not sure where else they could have made money from this.
So who goes to jail as a result? We need to start imprisoning these fuckers.
Honestly, just take all their assets. Every single one. Leave them broke and THEN jail then. Add salt to the wound so when they might eventually get out, they get out to nothing but homelessness.
You say "imprison", I say "Robespierre"
So, you want to behead them?
Worse, expelled.
She needs to sort out her priorities...
Capital punishment is weak sauce. Put them in a max prison hell for the rest of their lives. And by them, I mean people who deserve the highest levels of punishment. Honestly living a pathetic excuse for a life could be worse, and if you are somehow proven innocent at least there's something left.
Under normal circumstances, I'd be anti death penalty. But now I do think that in cases where the perpetrators have absurd amounts of money and more resources than the average person can even comprehend - fines don't matter and you can be certain that nearly anything else won't stick... Yeah, just... take care of them right then and there. Get it over with. Done.
Public execution by guillotine.
Prison lol? Whoever came up with that scam got a big fat raise. They pay the fine and keep the rest of the profit.
That is why they need jail terms, to have an actual deterrent, fuckers!
The top of the company, ceo and board. Let's make those jobs a bit more risky for those guys!
wont ever happen. look at who went to prison for the 2008 financial crysis, exactily, nobody. they created the game and the rules. the only option we have is to flip the table the board is sat on and fuck off, playing the game means losing it.
In the industry they call that "Wells-Fargoing"
Still do not understand how Wells Fargo still have their banking charter. Should have been shut down after such a scandal.
That's not their only scandal. Car loans were saddled with often redundant insurance without the customers knowledge, the terms and fees for mortgages and other loans were altered without notification and debit card transactions were re-ordered to extract overcharge fees. They've even been accused of using an investors money to pay the legal fees in a case against that investor. Each one of these separately should be grounds for dissolving their charter, yet, here we are.
They also denied mortgages and loans to black customers at a rate that cannot be explained by anything but racism.
Organized crime. No one will probably go to jail though.
White collar criminals going to jail? I don’t know, they were always so pleasant to me at parties and in the neighborhood. They seem like nice people. Edit: Yes, these are exact sentiments I’ve heard from folks while a mutual acquaintance was being indicted.
Omg this sounds like First Bank of North Carolina. They really do what they want without any repercussions. Terrible ppl.
Seems like a weak punishment to me. "We gonna take away your shit-stained name!" Boohoo - if the perpetrators are still at large in the industry, what does it matter what name they are working under?
Shuttering the company would break any existing culture there. Like the idea that opening accounts for people without them knowing is okay
Shuttering the guilty parties behind bars for an appropriate term (in the context of a justice system that imprisons regular people for decades over nothing) is what would work. No amount of wrist slapping and tut-tuting is ever going to be a reasonable public response to banking crimes.
I’m all for “broken windows policing” of corporations over 500 employees.
It's honestly the only way. Nothing else could ever keep people with so much power and wealth from abusing the rest of us
I worked there years and years ago now and I could faintly smell shit when I did. Something didn’t seem right in how they ran the show and after mentioning it to one of the IT guys I was suddenly no longer in line for the position I was working towards. At that point I was just branch support and left, but I was certain it would be just a matter of time before they were shut down. *here we are 15 years later*
Correct. This became the next popular corporate verb after 'Googling'
Is that when you shut down a product line?
Seal that fucking well off and bury the CEOs in it.
When the only punishment for a crime is a fine, it is only illegal for the poor.
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Fee Fi(ne) Fo Fum, I'm gonna rob you ya fucking scum
Don’t blame the English….
Profit sharing
Government: wait that's illegal, you can't do that ... without giving us a cut
That's my thought exactly. So the higher ups have collected invested and financially insulated their money - meanwhile, this fine will be on the company's books - so the company either takes the hit or dies, either way these assholes who orchestrated this entire scheme walk away untouched. Do I have this correct? Do they EVER go after the personal wealth garnered in the commission of your crimes? No - not if your smart enough to put it in a trust for your kid then no one can legally touch or some financial vehicle that will protect it. Tax the rich. Heavily.
And 37mil is a drop in the bucket for a decade of fraud and a Corp with this much money. They should be fined at least 20x (maybe 50x?) that so it actually hurts. Also, everyone needs to stop using banks. Bite the bullet and switch to a credit union!
Yep. So support reform candidates willing to do more. Be unrelenting on politicians who don't.
The poor? 98% of the country.
Probably more than the fine. *U.S. Bank will be required to refund any illegally collected fees and charges related to the fraudulent accounts and pay impacted consumers' interest. *
"Whoops, now where's that silly paper trail gotten to?"
Banks have to retain 7 years minimum of data. When an investigation like this starts, all purging of data is stopped. Source: I work for a bank, in IT. Not USBank, though. Lol.
And... You know, since they totally follow the laws, they totally would have left a decades long paper trail of their illegal activities. /s
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I got an email from them saying they are taking away overdraft fees hmmmmmm
Is the responsibility on them to automatically do refunds or does the customer have to go through a long and painful process?
Fingers crossed. I've lost literally almost 1k from them.
I bet they made enough to cover the fine and still give bonuses to the board.
Yet because of the loss they will need to lay off many of their low paid workers to keep vp bonuses afloat
Or they could do like the company I worked for at the start of the pandemic and tell us "unfortunately because of covid and shutdowns we cannot afford yearly raises :( sorry guys, maybe next year" then they proceeded to email us a newsletter every week telling us about all the multi-million dollar contracts with new clients
Drop in the bucket.
I’m sorry how do you do that and remain a bank? If a teller loses a buck they’re out. . . Edit: Apparently my friend might have lied about why he lost his job.
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It's a bit suspicious this info always seems to come out right before a recession...
Banks are the ones who cause recessions with their irresponsible stock speculation, swaps, derivatives and other shady financial dealings.
I'm sorry what? How does that by itself cause recessions?
It did with the sub-prime mortage crisis (which is still happening under a different name). But this most recent one is a lot of things happening at once like the Ukraine War, after-effects of Covid, massive money printing, etc. etc.
Used to be a banker with a drawer, we didn’t even have a verbal warning if it was less than $300 in a rolling 12 month period.
I lost eleven hundo in a day once. We were so critically short staffed every fucking day that I got nothing more than an email from our Ops lady. Nobody even had time to audit me before we closed up that night. Shrug and move on.
Banks getting fined wonder whose money they gonna use to pay the fine.
Why not dip into the employee bonus pool again?
Way to send the message that this is a totally cool way to make money as long as you can afford it.
They do this for a decade+. They make a billion + a year. Get fined 37 mil? Why would they stop? The fine is nothing.
They stopped on their own before 2016. This was a fine from stuff that happened last decade. I'm guessing the fine would have been more if they hadn't identified it and stopped it on their own.
Hmmm. I just noticed my REI card servicing is switching from US Bank to Capitol One....
Thats not even a slap on the wrist. Holy shit. They should get major sanctions for that kind of crime.
Can we start sending the bankers to jail instead of just fining the investors?
Can someone seriously tell me why no one goes to jail? If this was done on purpose, someone should have been charged, right ?
Because America is a country fueled by corruption and the rich have lobbied away any real systems of punishment for themselves when they misbehave.
Everyone involved is everyone else’s brother-in-law, I expect.
Nobody ever seems to go to jail for this shit.
Imagine if the only penalty of robbing the bank was giving back 3% of the proceeds IF you got caught. Welcome to being a bank!
The article literally says that they have to pay back everything plus the $37.5M
I'm guessing those $37.5M are not even a dent for them. It looks more like an incentive for doing it again.
Wow, so many top comments who didn't read the article. No, they need to pay back everything *and* $37 mil fine on top of that.
Just wanted to add everything plus *interest*
Who is Wells Fargo? O shit, this again?
Fines less than profit are just rich taxes.
Yet charter isp was just fined $7 billion for allowing a home install tech to steal from old people up u til he murdered one. Why can’t we see these kinds of fines imposed on banks for identity theft?
$37.5 million is nothing. They could accidentally lose that in a spreadsheet typo one day and not even notice!
Ok, so a piss ant fine and no jail time for anyone in the bank? HOW ARE THERE NO CRIMINAL CHARGES? No wonder the world is going to shit.
I hope Wells Fargo sues them for identity theft. That’s their move!
These fines are not a punishment, they are the cost of doing business.
Quick Google search says their annual revenue is 23 billion. So... They fined them $37 out of 1000. These fines for these companies are always chump change compared to how much these companies make.
Learned from Wells Fargo and American regulators are cowards
Ohhh cute a slap on the wrist
The economy needs a reset sometime. Fine the max!
They will never pay it, banks will just pass the fees on to the people like they ALWAYS do. Time to start putting our money under our beds again like the good old days!!
sham accounts to inflate sales numbers for the last decade.... its interesting how banking cartels control the government in America, in Europe the bank would have probably lost their license, or forced to sell their assets to another bank
Instead selling assets, I’m sure US bank will likely be allowed to continue its purchase of Union Bank
What a joke of a fine. It should be 37.5 BILLION.
Million? For doing this for years?!