Phony bank accounts resurface at Wells Fargo, with a twist

As a longtime forensic accountant who helps consumer lawyers investigate big financial institutions, Jay Patterson has made a point to do business with a smallish local bank in his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas. So he was startled in June 2022 when he received a bank statement from Wells Fargo showing $12 in an “Everyday Checking” account in his name, an account he didn’t know about and had never opened.

Patterson immediately called Wells Fargo, a bank he has often scrutinized in his work, and it closed the account. But he continued to investigate, he said, learning troubling things that even he, a finance expert, hadn’t known regarding how banks collect and disperse consumers’ financial data.

Other consumers, in public complaints to regulators, have detailed similarly mysterious Wells Fargo bank accounts, raising fresh questions, experts say, about compliance and risk management at a bank that has been rocked by scandals in recent years. In 2016, Wells Fargo was found to have opened millions of unauthorized accounts for existing customers to meet sales goals. Those woes caused the ouster of John Stumpf, the chief executive of the bank at the time.