Pervasive Sham Deals at Wells Fargo, and No One Noticed?
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Re: Pervasive Sham Deals at Wells Fargo, and No One Noticed?
#2One of the more surprising things I've discovered as I've worked more closely with our QA guys is how little auditing goes on, especially when everything seems to be doing well.
But I work in the relatively non-essential world of analytics. I can't imagine that the world of finance is so lightly examined. But I guess 2007 showed us that it really is lightly audited in some aspects.
Really, I think some of the difficulty is in the complexity of our financial system. I'd argue it's similar to how no single person fully understands how a modern OS runs on an x86 chip - usually it works, but there are issues hiding in the shadows. Sometimes one of those CPU errata comes and bites you and the system crashes. Other times there is a stack overflow - something that obviously shouldn't have happened except the code auditing guys didn't do their jobs.
Re: Pervasive Sham Deals at Wells Fargo, and No One Noticed?
#3One of the more surprising things I've discovered as I've worked more closely with our QA guys is how little auditing goes on, especially when everything seems to be doing well. But I work in the relatively non-essential world of analytics. I can't imagine that the world of finance is so lightly examined. But I guess 2007 showed us that it really is lightly audited in some aspects. Really, I think some of the difficu…
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Re: Pervasive Sham Deals at Wells Fargo, and No One Noticed?
#4Inconceivable.
Re: Pervasive Sham Deals at Wells Fargo, and No One Noticed?
#5How in the world can 5000+ people be "rogue employees"?
Re: Pervasive Sham Deals at Wells Fargo, and No One Noticed?
#6Inconceivable.
Really? I would be confident in saying "Predictable". And obviously I'm not condoning it, in case it needs to be stated.
Re: Pervasive Sham Deals at Wells Fargo, and No One Noticed?
#7How in the world can 5000+ people be "rogue employees"?
> How in the world can 5000+ people be "rogue employees"?
Well they have 265,200 employees, so I can see 1%-2% of people maybe trying to make a quick buck. You probably know at least 100 people. Can't you think of at least two of them that would get up to some shady shit for a buck, given the opportunity?
Re: Pervasive Sham Deals at Wells Fargo, and No One Noticed?
#8There was an AMA on Reddit with an ex-employee. Here's the link if anyone's interested:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/521cjr/iama_former_we...
Re: Pervasive Sham Deals at Wells Fargo, and No One Noticed?
#9Based on the numbers in the article, the fake accounts generated about $1 each on average. Based on my experience being charged fees much larger than $1 by banks, it seems like the vast majority of the accounts must have generated no fees.
I can easily see how that would happen. As a bank user, some line item in my statement with $0 in it wouldn't raise any eyebrows to me. And if I did get charged a fee, they would probably remove it if I complained. Even if my complaint got escalated, what are the odds it would be attributed to a system problem and not just some idiot who forgot he signed up for an account?
Re: Pervasive Sham Deals at Wells Fargo, and No One Noticed?
#10One of the more surprising things I've discovered as I've worked more closely with our QA guys is how little auditing goes on, especially when everything seems to be doing well. But I work in the relatively non-essential world of analytics. I can't imagine that the world of finance is so lightly examined. But I guess 2007 showed us that it really is lightly audited in some aspects. Really, I think some of the difficu…
> how little auditing goes on
Companies see Risk Desks, QA, etc. as 'cost centers', and try to keep these budgets down.
Risk adjusted, they are massive profit centers. In addition to the actual $$ they save in fines, and stock price losses, the damage to the brand is often in the billions. But it is hard to measure the impact of events that do not occur.