Wells Fargo Still Screwing Over Customers

The story of Methodist pastor Jeff Edwards’ bizarre legal ordeal is a window into the ongoing administrative depravity at Wells Fargo, and the way government authorities ― from Trump-appointed federal regulators to blue-state technocratic functionaries ― can enable and even amplify the bank’s misconduct. 

Over the past two and a half years, Wells Fargo has admitted to mistakenly foreclosing on hundreds of families, illegally repossessing more than 27,000 cars and fraudulently opening over 3 million accounts for people who never asked for them. The bank has undertaken at least four separate marketing campaigns aimed at improving its dreadful corporate image, issuing official apology after official apology for its litany of abuses. It has rolled out a new logo and a new brand tagline, and replaced its CEO twice since the fake account scandal started to make headlines. 

The only thing Wells Fargo hasn’t changed is its pattern of screwing over its own customers.
For Edwards, the madness began in April 2018, when the New Jersey Turnpike Authority noticed a problem with several checks the agency had written. Somehow the checks were being deposited not once but twice, with different dollar amounts each time.

A $216.08 check from the Turnpike Authority to the South Jersey Energy Company became a $1,450.13 check to a woman named Tyler Mathis. Three other forged checks landed in the same bank account after similar alterations. 
 

State police quickly opened an investigation, subpoenaing Wells Fargo for information on the bogus transactions. They interviewed Mathis in July, who said a mysterious man she called “Cousin Swing” had offered to give her a cut of several checks he needed to deposit.  The police decided not to charge Mathis, concluding she was a victim of the scheme, rather than a culprit. It’s common, in fact, for scammers to talk people into depositing checks on their behalf.

None of this should have been a problem for Edwards. He’d never met Mathis or Cousin Swing. But he had deposited four checks of his own on April 16, at the same Wells Fargo branch where Cousin Swing deposited the forgeries. And Wells Fargo seems to have screwed up the surveillance evidence it provided to the police-- handing them images from the bank’s ATM of Edwards depositing his checks, instead of the correct images. Edwards didn’t fit the description Mathis had given police of Cousin Swing ― but police trusted the bank to have its records straight.

After Edwards agreed to be interviewed by the State Police and provided copies of all his bank activity, Detective Condron was skeptical-- but he went back to Wells Fargo and asked the bank to make sure Edwards was the right guy. This should have been a red flag for both the bank and the police. Check fraud isn’t a super-sophisticated crime, but usually the perpetrators are smart enough to avoid using their own local bank. And it's extremely unlikely that the person running a fraud scheme is a long-term customer who just happens to start sprinkling bogus checks in with his regular banking activity.

But the day after Condron asked Wells Fargo to double-check, the bank’s subpoena compliance team reported back that the man in the photo was definitely the guy who’d deposited the fake checks. When the police asked for additional evidence, Wells Fargo again sent them the same surveillance photos of Edwards making his deposits at the ATM ― but this time with the numbers of the fraudulent checks handwritten across the images.

Edwards was given the runaround by bank offices and were completely uncooperative up to the point that Edwards was arrested by the police.   After he was charged, Edwards called Wells Fargo yet again. This time, he was told the bank had “closed” the inquiry into the Mathis account. The ATM that had taken Edwards’ photograph didn’t keep detailed date-and-time records after two weeks. The bank couldn’t provide evidence to clear his name.

As miscarriages of justice go, Edwards ultimately got off pretty easy. A judge dismissed his case in January 2019, citing the prosecution’s lack of evidence. But the fact that it could have been worse doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in either the New Jersey State Police or Wells Fargo. The case against Edwards was a joke, and police tried to pressure him to confess anyway, before wasting the state’s time and money on a frivolous trial. 

Even with at least three different departments on the case, the bank was simply administratively incapable of fixing the problem it created by sending police the wrong photo.  Edwards is now suing both the state police and Wells Fargo for “false arrest, malicious prosecution and humiliation of an innocent man

The fact remains that Wells Fargo is a recidivist institution. It has admitted to defrauding people by the thousands, repeatedly, over the past two years. Nobody at the bank has been prosecuted for any of the infractions. Recently ousted CEO Tim Sloan made $18.4 million last year, $17.4 million the year before that and over $60.4 million at the bank before the fake account scandal broke.

The federal government could do something about this. Federal regulators have the authority to break up a bank into smaller institutions that someone might be able to manage competently. And prosecutors have the authority to bring criminal charges against bank executives who oversee fraudulent enterprises.

But neither the Trump nor the Obama administrations have expressed much interest in white-collar crime prosecutions at big banks. The standard solution for a bank like Wells Fargo is to slap it with a fine and move on. Those fines are becoming an ordinary cost of doing business. Last year, the bank posted a $22.4 billion profit.

 
And state governments aren’t doing much better. In February, California State Treasurer Fiona Ma ― an elected Democrat ― quietly lifted the sanctions her predecessor had imposed.

The Parsippany United Methodist Church has closed all of its accounts with Wells Fargo, but Edwards is still a customer at the bank. He says it’s the only way he’ll ever get an apology.

He’s still waiting.