Thread regarding Wells Fargo & Co. layoffs

Wells will settle they always do cheaper than caring ! They don’t even trust their own compliance areas or ask just pay off the person. They should realize this makes a good honest person who is doing the job properly feel worthless. You wonder why we quit ! That !

I've seen this many times. The victim is told to wire the funds and told NOT to tell the bank the actual reason because the WF employee would have known it was a scam and denied the wire. The scammers have victim lie...."it's an investment, my sister is there and needs me to send her money for a hospital bill, etc...etc...They focus on the elderly because they are no tech savvy and usually the hit at a very vulnerable time. We can't stop all but we can do our best to educate our customer on the latest scams...that goes for our team members too.

But the fact that she willingly made those transactions is really on her. I do not expect a bank to come and tell me to not make these transactions as I was the one who logged onto the account and initiated them.

If I get an email where I have to make these large transactions to a foreign bank (most likely a scam), I would first Google to research these scams just to see what the heck is going on.

I would not even bother walking into a bank to transfer the money - like, really???!!!

Most likely, she is in on the scam too.

It's apparent most of you just skimmed the story.
She made five transactions at two different WF locations (50k each). They didn't say anything to her until she attempted the sixth. "oh, by the way, that place you've been wiring money? yeah, it's a scam. would you still like to proceed?".

Also, the "unauthorized remote logins". They had her move money from savings to checking, then they had her change her password. The unauthorized remote logins were not her logins, they were logins from another location, possibly a foreign country. Yeah. WF does have liability.

Over a decade ago, a construction company in California noticed their bank account was missing $400k+. They sued the bank. The bank's defense was that they offered MFA, but the business turned it down. The bank lost the case. The judgement was that they had due care to require MFA for commercial accounts.

I would sue Microsoft. It is probably all of their software that was being used and tbey said they were from Microsoft.

Good feedback here.

I can’t help but question if this is a result of some cost-cutting, offshoring, outsourcing, d-mbing-down of WF courtesy of our new Executive Leadership. It’s happening in our LOB. They have zero respect for the risks involved in eliminating experienced workers and replacing them with entry level inexperienced call center workers who are making decisions from some pre-written script rather than understanding what they are doing.

Refer back to the $900 million Citigroup error resulting from a contractor checking the wrong box on a digital payment form.

@1jxk+
There's zero doubt that it was flagged, there were likely big red flags going off all over the place. That's what makes the story of this elderly person highly questionable. There's a 99.9% chance they blasted her with questions about these large transfers, the only way they would have been processed is if she tried hard to get them through. All banks and credit card companies use similar tools, including AI etc, to flag strange activity. I would say most people at this bank don't like seeing elderly people being prayed on by scam artist, heck some of us elderly ourselves. It looks like WF also tried to reverse the transactions with this other bank.

Banks are supposed to have systems and processes in place to catch and prevent suspicious and potentially criminal activity, which often involves foreign banks. WFC absolutely should have caught and verified five separate $50,000 transactions going to the Bank of Bangkok before allowing all five of them to process. These should have popped out on a report somewhere and someone should have then investigated to see if this was normal activity for this customer.

I don’t understand how they all were allowed to go through. This Christmas, I tried to buy 5 different $100 gift cards for members of my family on my Capital One Card. They stopped me at the second transaction suspecting fraudulent activity.

I’m sure we don’t have all the facts and I don’t think we necessarily should have to pay for a customer’s mistakes but I do think we F’d up somewhere.

IME legitimate transactions by cr---y vendors is what is caught, illegitimate transactions by legitimate vendors is much less common.

There are several different methods in play. One, they pretend they're giving you a refund. You logged into your bank, and they have control over your system. They show you a black or static screen while they edit the source in developer mode then show you OOPS we added too many zeros and now we need you to send this money back to us so I don't get fired. You wouldn't want me to get fired, would you? Please help.

Remember the victims aren't the brightest tools in the shed and easily confused by the slick scammer who has practiced this thousands of times by now. A person with half a brain would drop the control session, log into their account separately and see that it's a scam. Problem is, a person smart enough to do that would not have let the scammer have control over their system in the first place.

It really is a shame there are people like that in the world. But as long as our governments just leave them alone, that's what we have.

So anybody can sue the bank if they send money and could not get it back and regretted it. If I took out a bunch of money from the bank and paid some guy in error - can I sue the bank for allowing me to withdraw that $?

It is sad when we have to watch our backs constantly and cannot trust anybody. Bad karma to scammers! So evil.

I'm just curious to know what prompted her to send all that money multiple times. What was she supposed to get out of it?

What makes you think the lady isn't in on the scam?

It is not be WF's responsibility to watch her money that she willingly let go. It just happened to be on WF's platform. That could be BofA or Chase. Problem is other banks have limitations on $ transfers but in no way should WF should be held responsible unless they perpetuated the fraud which they did not.

Plaintiff is hoping that WF can be held partially liable by not limiting the amount of outgoing funds. For that amount, my bank would ask me to wire the money out and that would involve all types of questionnaires and making sure the receiver of the money is legit.

Wonder what lawyer is representing her. They tend to claim 50-80% of reward from trial so whatever she wins (if she does win) will not be much. I'm sure she figures she has nothing to lose and hopes WF will settle.

Just wait until the tide pod eaters become elderly….

Zelle only lets me xfer 1k per day to another person.

You give a scammer control over your computer while logged into your bank account and you own the consequences, in my opinion.
This one's on you granny. Sorry about that. Scammer are the lowest form of people :(

I know this scam. It really does suck. I despise whole countries of people because of this practice.
Still... not sure how it's WF problem in any way.

I do wish our government would spend less time on stupid things and put some money toward stamping out this sort of scam. I'm guessing it must be too lucrative to someone somewhere for them to keep turning a blind eye to it. (Don't get me started on the carriers, who really should be the first line of defense and seem to be ignoring some exceedingly simple tech barriers they could put up to prevent it entirely.)

Heck, random youtubers with a few grand to spare are able to follow up on these scammers and locate their origin. (And the mules here stateside) Certainly an actual intelligence or investigation agency would be able to do the same, if they cared.

She never came into the bank. Some people are just not all there in the mind. Sorry elderly lady, but this one is on you.

It say she went to "two separate Wells Fargo locations." So she showed up at branches and made these transfers? I work in a branch and if any old person started moving large dollars like that there would be a tons of questions asked of the customer. I think the bank does a excellent job protecting customers. Most the time its the other way around customers are angry because we have to many checks and stop things when they didn't want them stopped.

The problem is catching the online account transactions. How do you control millions of transactions a day? Then, if you place more control in the system, clients are frustrated with the process. So which is it? Prefer for freedom because it's your money or an arduous process that is too cumbersome?

Elder abuse compliance is terrible, we have virtually no controls for this. It’s all human error prone

The lawsuit says the fraudster changed her password and transferred the money. Then a little further it says the plaintiff did the transfers under duress. Which is it? Then it says she's trying to get "more than 50K" to cover her losses, but then it says she made 5-6 transfers of 50K. This story and its facts are a absolute mess. When i do any sort of internal transaction with my WF account, its often flat out denied and i have to call the bank to redo it. If any elderly person is transferring six 50K transactions to southeast asia you can be dead sure its going to trip dozen's of flags. Something doesn't add up with her story. Everyone at the bank takes dozens of training courses every year on just such topics and elderly abuse. It's always possible WF screwed up, but highly highly unlikely.

"The fraudster was able to gain access to Livingston’s online Wells Fargo account by having her login, and proceeded to change her password, attempt a Zelle money-transfer, and transfer hundreds of thousands of dollars from her savings account to her checking account, all without her consent, according to the lawsuit."

"Under duress, the plaintiff made five different $50,000 transactions to the Bank of Bangkok, per the fraudsters instruction, at two separate Wells Fargo locations in a “very short period of time,” says the lawsuit. "

"Plaintiff is demanding a jury trial and seeking an amount well-in-excess of $50,000 that will fully compensate her for her losses to the Wells Fargo fraud. "