Wells Fargo to pay $3.7B for mistreating customers

I worked for a Wells Fargo joint venture when I was younger, doing credit research for mortgages during the early 00's bubble.

I very quickly came to the conclusion that all of their quality assurance rules were designed to whitewash, not catch, fraud, let alone simple mistakes. No one cared if what was going on our reports was total nonsense, so long as it was nonsense that fit the rules the underwriters had.

Basically the job was to research negative items on credit reports, and if I could get the creditor to say one of a dozen things, I could take it off the report and get it rescored. So a lot of phone calling.

There was a guy in my unit that'd been there years. He made less than 1 or 2 phone calls a day, but yet cleared the exceeds expectations number of reports consistently. I realized he was just never calling anyone, and writing up total fabricated notes on the files. But because the quality assurance sampled random calls, not random files, this was totally accepted.

This was great for WF: workers would commit fraud, but only in the direction that got more loans sold, and if it ever got noticed, they could just fire the call center worker and claim it was a "bad apple."

When I saw the story about WF branch managers opening accounts in customers names without permission I wasn't surprised in the slightest.

I believe the entire company leadership is consciously behind this sort of winking internal corruption that just so happens to increase the bottom line and bonuses for everyone involved.

> I get what you mean, but what's the alternative? How should you behave if you're exempt from normal social boundaries because of your personal tragedy? Shout at random people? Throw things? Punch some guy in the face?

I don't mean to put words in obblekk's mouth (text box) so what I perceived them as meaning is: I don't think the person you're replying to was advocating for direct person-on-person action. When we see people protesting or pushing back against or loudly saying "this is wrong and I won't have it and neither should you" kinds of things, we should consider how our personal situation could rapidly change to be like theirs. And, in a lot of cases, would have been like theirs but for some skill at leveraging a few strokes of uncontrollable luck.

To me, it's like when people complain that "those damn unionized trash truck drivers are making $90,000 with a lot of overtime and a pension." Why is the response to try to tear them down, when the correct, to my mind, question is "why don't I have that, too?"

Capital One has no-charge partner ATM's everywhere (7/11, CVS, gas stations, there's like 100 in a 10-mile radius of me), some of the best interest rates (currently 3.3%), some of the best credit cards (3% cash back food/entertainment w/ 0$ annual), and best software tech / mobile app (#1 bank app on iOS, 4.9/5 rating). I'm not affiliated in anyway, I just am pleased with all their products for the last 10 years.

> If you agree to something, you are not a victim, you are a participant.

If you cannot give informed or willing consent, you are not a participant, you are a victim. Impenetrable, hard to read terms are not informed consent, particularly when the terms are in a contract of adhesion.

> Don’t like the mortgage process? Don’t get a mortgage. Pay cash, or rent.

Couple of points here. First, I take it you've never read a modern leasing contract. In most jurisdictions, especially where the large corporate landlords have almost entirely conquered the market, they are just as opaque. Landlord associations promulgate so-called "standard leases" that contain myriad difficult to comprehend terms.

> The world doesn’t owe you the exact terms you want. That’s not the fault of capitalism

Perhaps it does not, but yes, it is the fault of capitalism. When all of the participants in a market operate in virtually identical ways because the optimal path, under capitalism, is to legalese first and ask questions later, that is absolutely a failure caused by the capitalistic system. It all stems from the idea that, under capitalism, an individual or group's highest and best course of outcome is to feverishly grab for every single available resource to hoard it against use by others. Along the way, some of those resources are (often temporarily) lent out at an inflated rate to ensure that more resources are grabbed.

This works fine when it comes to a mobile phone device or a book or a toy. Those are optional, often called "luxury", goods that we can leave or take as we desire. Housing, water, food, transportation, energy; we need all of these to live as humans, yet that's where capitalism extracts its most gains because the more desperate someone is for one of these, the more resources they will throw in to fill the need they must fill.

I can’t even afford a home right now on a tech salary with sky high rent paying off my landlords 2% refi’d mortgage and student loans making it impossible at 6-7% fed interest rate hikes and inflated home prices after the insane COVID housing price bubble increase.

I feel like life won’t start for another 5+ years for people like me, unless we gamble on being underwater on an inflated mortgage entering at the peak of the housing market paying more for a fraction of the home you could get just 1-2 year ago. You can’t even refi an underwater mortgage, anyone have anny advice for people in my unenviable position?