Wells Fargo to settle US illegal activity charges with $3.7B payout

Wells Fargo, an American multinational financial services company headquartered in San Francisco, California, was charged by the consumer watchdog in the United States with various offenses that allegedly harmed customers. Now the company is settling the charges by agreeing to pay a total of $3.7 billion.

According to Reuters, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) ordered Wells Fargo Bank to pay the multi-billion amount to settle civil penalty for $1.7 billion and $2 billion to correct more than 16 million customer accounts that were affected by various violations.

The CFPB said that some of the offenses committed by Wells Fargo include illegal assessment of fees and interest charges on mortgage and auto loans and mismanagement of account deposits. The bureau further said the bank "wrongly repossessed" vehicles and collected illegal overdraft fees, which are not normally charged to customers.

To sum it up, the CFSB said Wells Fargo was ordered to pay a huge penalty for its alleged illegal activities when doing its business concerning mortgages, auto loans, and bank deposits. The federal regulator stated that the bank’s misconduct hurt many of its customers. At any rate, it turned out that this was not the first time that the bank was found to have breached some state laws.

“Wells Fargo’s rinse-repeat cycle of violating the law has harmed millions of American families,” CNN Business quoted CFPB’s director, Rohit Chopra, as saying in a statement.

Meanwhile, Wells Fargo released a statement in connection with the settlement. The company verified that it has entered into an agreement with CFPB to finally resolve a number of issues, including those that have been ongoing for several years.

“As we have said before, we and our regulators have identified a series of unacceptable practices that we have been working systematically to change and provide customer remediation where warranted,” Wells Fargo’s chief executive officer, Charlie Scharf, said in a press release. “This far-reaching agreement is an important milestone in our work to transform the operating practices at Wells Fargo and to put these issues behind us.”

The CEO added, “Our top priority is to continue to build a risk and control infrastructure that reflects the size and complexity of Wells Fargo and run the company in a more controlled, disciplined way. We have made significant progress over the last three years and are a different company today.”

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