In discussing the WF employee account slamming, which ended with over a million fraudulent accounts and over 5000 employees being dismissed, the question as to the dismissed employee’s scheme arose.
Scheme is the term used to describe the process of adding on un-requested accounts to existing account holders accounts.
Did each of the employees arrive at the scheme independently, or was there some back channel where an employee could learn how to implement the scheme from a compatriot?
It’s hard to believe several hundred or several thousand employees arrived at the idea independently, in multiple locations. Especially because it involved (from what I read) in some cases moving money from customers’ accounts to the new/phoney ones. That’s rising to a much higher level of illegality. I can’t believe a thousand or more employees decided “I’m going to take money out of a customer’s account and park it somewhere else, where it will be eaten by fees.”
There’s a Pit thread on this, and I posted links to articles where employees were pressured by their supervisors so the branch could make their numbers.
Employees who complained to the ethics hotline were later fired.
I’d say it was corporate culture, not rogue employees, that drove this.