Wells Fargo Charged 800,000 Customers for Fake Car Insurance, Stole 25,000 Cars—Nobody Charged

One of the largest banks in the United States is no stranger to scandal, and the latest case of fraud surrounding Wells Fargo has affected nearly 1 million people, with many of them still paying the price for fraudulent charges attached to their accounts.

According to an internal report from the bank’s executives, detailed in a report by The New York Times this week, more than 800,000 people who took out car loans from Wells Fargo were charged for auto insurance they did not need, and the additional expenses “pushed roughly 274,000 Wells Fargo customers into delinquency and resulted in almost 25,000 wrongful vehicle repossession.”

The report looked at the insurance policies sold to Wells Fargo customers from January 2012 to July 2016. State insurance regulations required the bank to notify customers of the insurance policy—which was typically more expensive than the auto insurance customers had already purchased—before it was imposed. However, the report found that in many cases, Wells Fargo did not comply.

Advertisment

As a result, estimates from the report claimed that Wells Fargo now owes at least $73 million to wronged customers. According to The Times, “Wells Fargo officials confirmed that the improper insurance practices took place and said the bank was determined to make customers whole.”

This is not the first time Wells Fargo has found itself at the center of a scandal…

In August 2010, Wells Fargo came under fire for stealing millions from its customers through excessive overdraft fees, which included the practice of manipulating the order in which transactions are processed, in order to capitalize on the overdraft fees customers are issued as a result.

READ MORE:  Spain Sets Massive Precedent — Charges Its Central Bankers in Court

A district court judge in California weighed in on the practice, and determined that Wells Fargo “acted in bad faith” by manipulating transactions, and that “no credible evidence was presented at trial to support the bank’s argument that high-to-low resequencing was deployed [because] customers wanted or benefitted from it.” The judge came to the conclusion that “gouging and profiteering were Wells Fargo’s true motivations.”

As The Free Thought Project reported in April 2016, Wells Fargo admitted that it “falsely certified that many of its home loans qualified for Federal Housing Administration insurance” from 2001 to 2008, and it “failed to file timely reports on several thousand loans that had material defects or were badly underwritten” from 2002 to 2010.

However, despite the shocking admission from the megabank that it deceived both the U.S. government and thousands of Americans for nearly a decade, no one was charged and Wells Fargo was not held accountable for its contribution to the housing market collapse.

In September 2016, federal regulators revealed that Wells Fargo employees had secretly created nearly 2 million unauthorized bank and credit card accounts since 2011. Customers were forced to pay fraudulent charges, and the employees who created the accounts were rewarded with sales bonuses.

As a result, Wells Fargo claimed it fired 5,300 employees for ethics violations. However, many of the former employees who spoke out about the bank’s fraudulent practices claimed that they were fired because they attempted to report the fraud to the bank’s internal ethics line.

Now, in addition to contributing to the housing market collapse, the latest report has revealed that Wells Fargo also harmed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans by sending them into debt, and even repossessing their cars, all over fraudulent charges. And yet, to go along with the incredulous fact that the bank still has customers, its ties to the U.S. government have also ensured that top executives are unlikely to face any accountability for its actions.

Bernie and Jane Sanders Under Investigation for Possible Bank Fraud

[image: legalinsurrection.com]The Department of Justice (DOJ), FBI, and FDIC are investigating whether Jane Sanders committed bank fraud while serving as president of the now-defunct Burlington College (from 2004 – 2011). Bernie Sanders is a person of interest, explained below.

Under her leadership, enrollment and donations dropped. In 2010, she bought 33 acres of land to expand the school. The strategy failed to increase enrollments.

In 2014, Burlington College was placed under probation. In 2016, it declared bankruptcy and closed down.

Mrs. Sanders allegedly falsified loan application documents for financing to expand the campus, claiming Corinne Bove Maietta pledged $1 million to the school over a five-year period.

According to an FDIC investigator, she never agreed to pledge any amount while still alive. She’s aged 83 – agreeing only to donate an unspecified posthumous sum.

Loan application documents show Mrs. Sanders said Maietta agreed to make a series of cash donations. Her alleged pledge along with others were used as collateral.

Maietta told FDIC investigators she was astonished to learn how she was improperly used. “You can’t borrow money on the future,” she said. “That doesn’t exist. They had me (donating) in increments. No, never.”

She never signed an agreement to donate anything. Burlington College wasn’t included in her will until around a year after Mrs. Sanders’ land purchase.

“I remember Jane asking if I would sign something, and I said I never sign anything. You’ll have to go through my accountant,” she explained.

After donating less than $100,000, she agreed to leave the college an unspecified amount in her will. “I never told them how much, and I never signed anything…It was all on my word,” she said.

According to two former college employees contacted by the FBI, information in Mrs. Sanders loan agreement with People’s United Bank is under federal investigation for possible fraud.

In January 2016, Republican attorney Brady Toensing asked the US Attorney for the District of Vermont and the FDIC inspector general to investigate whether Mrs. Sanders committed fraud by falsifying information on her loan application – according to Carol Moore, Burlington College’s last president.

People’s United Bank provided Mrs. Sanders with a $10.7 million loan to finance her land purchase, lakefront property to expand the Burlington College campus.

Senator Sanders is a person of interest. According to Politico, a “letter to federal prosecutors in early 2016 alleged (his) office had pressured the bank to approve the loan application submitted by” his wife.

The letter said “(i)mproper pressure by a United States Senator is a serious ethical violation.”

So far, he hasn’t commented publicly on the controversy surrounding his wife. His involvement leaves him vulnerable to possible Senate censure on ethics violations.

It could be worse if federal investigators claim he was complicit in his wife’s loan application deception – if it’s determined to be bank fraud.

Spain Sets Massive Precedent — Charges Its Central Bankers in Court

First, Iceland, and now Spain has taken on the Big Bankers responsible for financial calamity, as the country’s highest national court charged the former head of Spain’s central bank, a market regulator, and five other banking officials over a failed bank leading to the loss of millions of euros for smaller investors.

This, of course, markedly departs from the mammoth taxpayer giveaway — commonly referred to as the bailout — approved by the U.S. government ostensively to “save” the Big Banks and, albeit unstated, allow the enormous institutions to continue bilking customers without the slightest fear of penalty.

Errant bankers and financiers, it would seem, typically manage to either evade actually being charged, or escape hefty fines and time behind bars.

Spain’s Supreme Court last year ruled “serious inaccuracies” in information about the listing led investors to back Bankia in error, thus the bank has since paid out millions of euros in compensation.

But Spanish authorities could not abide the telling findings of a yearslong investigation into the failed listing, as Wolf Street explains,

“As part of the epic, multi-year criminal investigation into the doomed IPO of Spain’s frankenbank Bankia – which had been assembled from the festering corpses of seven already defunct saving banks – Spain’s national court called to testify six current and former directors of the Bank of Spain, including its former governor, Miguel Ángel Fernández Ordóñez, and its former deputy governor (and current head of the Bank of International Settlements’ Financial Stability Institute), Fernando Restoy. It also summoned for questioning Julio Segura, the former president of Spain’s financial markets regulator, the CNMV [National Securities Market Commission] (the Spanish equivalent of the SEC in the US).

“The six central bankers and one financial regulator stand accused of authorizing the public launch of Bankia in 2011 despite repeated warnings from the Bank of Spain’s own team of inspectors that the banking group was ‘unviable.’”

As AFP reports, “The National Court validated conclusions made by prosecutors who concluded that when ‘an unviable entity has been listed on the stock market, its administrators or auditor should not shoulder all the responsibility.’”

Specifics of the charges have not yet been made apparent, but as The Economist reports:

“The court is questioning why they allowed Bankia to sell shares in an initial public offering in 2011, less than a year before Bankia’s portfolio of bad mortgage loans forced the government to seize control of it. It said there was evidence the regulators had ‘full and thorough knowledge’ of Bankia’s plight. After its nationalisation, it went on to report a €19.2bn ($24.7bn) loss for 2012, the largest in Spanish corporate history.”

Internal emails and documents played a crucial role in ultimately bringing the central banking officials to task for the failure of Bankia — inspectors bringing issues to the attention of superiors were allegedly ignored. One email cited by the Economist came from an inspector who warned Bankia was “a money-losing machine,” for which an IPO would not solve.

Another report, deemed “devastating by the court,” saw an inspector advise Bankia to seek a private buyer rather than proceed with the listing.

An inquiry into “the participation of other players, such as officials in the central bank,” was also urged by the National Court.

As the Economist points out, Spanish judges are generally reluctant to sentence first-time financial criminals to prison; though five Novacaixagalicia executives had five-year suspended sentences — levied for embezzlement in 2015 — abruptly enforced in January.

Meanwhile, taxpayers in the United States have yet to see Big Bankers criminally responsible for the financial ruin of so many Americans brought to any semblance of justice for their wrongdoing.