SAN FRANCISCO–Wells Fargo has been moving aggressively to kill lawsuits related to the scandal related to the sham accounts it opened for customers.
The bank has sought to force those lawsuits into private arbitration, an often secretive process that typically favors large corporations, reported the New York Times.
“Lawyers for the bank’s customers say the legal motions are an attempt to limit the bank’s accountability for the widespread fraud and deny its customers their day in open court,” the Times reported.
In all, Wells Fargo created more than two-million accounts that customers never requested as the result of a high-pressure internal sales culture that required employees to open as many as eight accounts per customer. More than 5,000 employees were fired over a period of years for opening the fake accounts, but many of those employees have alleged they were actually fired for refusing to do so.
As the Times reported, what many customers who have filed suit are discovering is that the agreements they signed when opening accounts included arbitration clauses that prevent consumers from banding together to file a lawsuit as a class, “forcing them instead to hash out their disputes one by one and blunting one of most powerful tools that Americans have in challenging harmful and deceitful practices by big companies.”
One customer who is suing, a Utah-based attorney, said it would be impossible for her to agree to arbitrate her dispute over an account that she had never signed up for in the first place.
But the Times reported that Wells Fargo has responded that the arbitration clauses included in the legitimate contracts customers signed to open bank accounts also cover disputes related to the false ones set up in their names.