Wells Fargo's staff opened 3.5 million fake accounts to hit impossible sales quotas

For years, Wells Fargo was held up as a model bank — it had weathered the 2008 financial crisis better than most and was admired for its strategy of 'cross-selling,' selling each customer multiple products. The internal goal was captured in the slogan 'Eight is Great': get each customer to hold eight products. To enforce it, the bank set extremely aggressive sales quotas for its branch employees, with intense pressure to meet them.

The quotas were, for many employees, impossible to meet honestly. So they cheated — on a massive scale. To hit their numbers, staff opened millions of savings and checking accounts, and applied for credit cards, in customers' names without their knowledge or consent. They forged signatures, created fake email addresses, and transferred customers' money into the unauthorized accounts. By the bank's own later count, roughly 3.5 million fake accounts had been opened between 2011 and 2016.

The scheme came into the open in September 2016, when regulators — including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — fined Wells Fargo a combined $185 million. The bank fired thousands of employees, but the scandal grew: the total cost ballooned to billions in fines and settlements, and CEO John Stumpf, who had championed the cross-selling strategy, was forced to resign. Investigations revealed that warnings about the sales culture had been raised internally — and even reported in the press — years before, and ignored.