Wells Fargo is America’s Stagecoach Robber—Believe Me, I Worked There

I’m furious and disgusted with Wells Fargo for their latest scandal, where they opened 2 million fake financial accounts and stole millions of dollars worth of bogus fees from their own customers. Wells Fargo, for years, was acting aggressively to encourage its bank employees to “cross-sell” different products to its bank customers by encouraging people to sign up for credit cards and additional accounts, and sometimes the pressure from management caused low-level sales people to feel like they had to break the rules in order to meet their sales quotas and avoid losing their jobs. To date, 5,300 employees have been fired and the company has paid $185 million in fines.

I don’t know why I’m taking this one so personally. After all, no one should be naïve about the capacities of American banks to do the wrong thing; Wells Fargo is a big American bank, and big American banks do lots of bad stuff all the time. But this latest Wells Fargo scandal somehow feels worse than the rest. Even the credit crisis and financial meltdown of 2008, which was caused by lots of big banks being too greedy and too lax in issuing subprime mortgage loans to people who had no business getting a loan, and by committing predatory lending behavior against poor, minority and disadvantaged borrowers, seems “better” than this. Because even though they almost wrecked the whole global economy, the subprime loan scandal was more understandable and forgivable—because everyone in the financial industry was doing it, everyone was benefiting from it (companies and shareholders and consumers alike), regulators and financial journalists turned a blind eye to it, and lots of otherwise-smart people thought that the party was never going to stop because housing prices were going to keep rising forever.

But this new scandal from Wells Fargo is even more disgraceful, because of the sleaziness of it, the smallness of it, the meanness of it. Banks are supposed to help protect their customers from fraud and identity theft; Wells Fargo was actively committing fraud and identity theft. They were reaching into their own customers’ pocketbooks to pad their bottom line. Wells Fargo’s brand is the noble Western stagecoach, but the bank is acting more like stagecoach robbers. A few days ago, there was widespread social media outrage about a man in New York who was caught on camera blatantly stealing $600 from an elderly woman in a wheelchair—after he gets out of jail, he should get a job as a Wells Fargo bank executive.

Speaking of Wells Fargo executives, here’s Elizabeth Warren verbally decapitating CEO John Stumpf earlier this morning:

Full disclosure: I used to work at Wells Fargo from 2006-2010. It did not go well; I got into the financial services industry just in time for the subprime meltdown, financial crisis, and Great Recession. In fact, I almost got fired from Wells Fargo (for general incompetence and insubordination) because I was bored and lazy and miserable, and I realized a few years too late that I never wanted to sit in a cubicle or work in corporate America ever again (I used to have panic attacks in my cubicle all the time; once they had to call 9-1-1 for me, and paramedics wheeled me out on a stretcher and took me to the Emergency Room because they thought I was having a heart attack).

When I worked at Wells Fargo, my favorite pastime at work was to sit in my cubicle and think of ways to kill myself. My best friend at work was Fidencio, one of the Mexican janitors, and I used to envy him and the other custodial staff because they always would sit together during lunchtime, laughing and chatting happily in Spanish, and I used to think, “How nice it must be to have friends.” I always ate sad microwaved lunches alone at my desk, staring at my windowless wall, surrounded by co-workers who, I later learned, were secretly conspiring against me and complaining to my boss behind my back about things that I wrote on the Internet in my personal time. (CONFIDENTIAL NOTE TO MY FORMER BACKSTABBING CO-WORKERS: I now make a lot more money writing things on the Internet than any of you make working at Wells Fargo! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! SUCKERS!!!) I somehow hung on for dear life long enough to not get fired, because my wife was pregnant and we needed the health insurance. Apparently I do my best work when my back is against the wall; I’m a very bad employee, really—never hire me for anything other than “writing angry political rants on a freelance basis.”

But one of the things I remember from working at Wells Fargo is that people who worked there tended to have a lot of pride in the unique culture and heritage of the bank; even during the most miserable days of the global financial meltdown, they really believed that Wells Fargo had ethical leaders and that we were—at least, relative to the rest of the banking industry—doing things better and treating customers the right way. Wells Fargo employees were proud to have Warren Buffett as their biggest investor—one of the widely respected “good guys” of American capitalism. Wells Fargo is a major employer in my home city of Des Moines, IA, and I know a lot of good people who work there.

And maybe that’s what makes me so mad: the many good people I know who work at Wells Fargo deserve better than an executive leadership team that would allow this kind of systemic betrayal of customer trust.

Because it’s ultimately all the executive leadership’s fault, right? They’re the ones who are supposed to maintain the bank’s reputation and set the tone for the company’s internal culture. They’re the ones who are supposed to be held accountable when things go wrong. But instead, Wells Fargo fired 5,300 low-level bank employees for their roles in the fake account-openings, while the top community banking executive, Carrie Tolstedt, recently announced that she’ll be retiring with a $124.6 million payday.

This is absolutely disgraceful. But this is how it goes in America: the little people on the front lines get fired and the big guys (and sometimes gals) at the top get paid. Hey, maybe it’s a sign of progress that women business executives are finally getting away with being as crooked and overpaid as men?