Wells Fargo is paying up and laying off thousands of workers after it reached an agreement to settle allegations that, for years, its employees extracted millions in fees by regularly opening new accounts for customers without their knowledge, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
据美国消费者金融保护局表示,富国银行员工多年来未经客户同意秘密开设账户,从中提取数百万元。在指控达成和解后,富国银行支付罚单,并解雇数千名员工。
Under the agreement, announced by the C.F.P.B., Wells Fargo will pay a total of $185 million: a $100 million fine to the C.F.P.B.'s Civil Penalty Fund, $35 million the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and an additional $50 million to the City and County of Los Angeles.
美国消费者金融保护局宣布,根据该协议,富国银行将支付1.85亿美元,其中1亿支付美国消费者金融保护局民事处罚基金,3500万美元支付给美国货币监理署,另外5000万美元支付给洛杉矶政府。
Richard Cordray, the bureau's director, called it the "largest penalty the C.F.P.B. has ever imposed" because of "the severity of these violations."
消费者金融保护局官员理查德·考德瑞表示,由于"违规的严重性",这是"该机构开出的最大一笔罚单"。
Federal regulators say that scheme, which allegedly began in 2011, involved Wells Fargo employees secretly creating millions of potentially unauthorized credit-card and bank accounts.
联邦管理机构表示,这种行为据说从2011年就已有之,富国银行的员工可能已经秘密开设数百万未经授权的信用卡和银行账户。
Incentivized by rigorous sales quotas and compensation, employees transferred money from existing customer accounts to surreptitiously opened new accounts, the C.F.P.B. explained in its statement.
美国消费者金融保护局在声明中解释道,受到严格的销售配额和补偿的刺激,员工将客户现有账户的资金转入未经他们授权的新账户中。
Unaware that their balances had changed, customers were then charged overdraft fees or penalties for insufficient funds.
这样一来,并不知情他们收支变化的客户,将因存款不足或透支而被收取费用。
Over the course of five years, the C.F.P.B. said that employees opened about 1.5 million deposit accounts that customers may not have authorized, and applied for roughly 565,000 credit-card accounts under the same conditions.
美国消费者金融保护局表示,在过去的五年中,富国银行员工开设了150万个未经客户授权的储蓄账户,还在用户未授权的情况下申请了大约56.5万张信用卡。
Regulators said employees went as far as creating fake e-mail addresses and PINs in order to pull it off.
联邦管理机构还表示,银行员工为了达到目的甚至会伪造电子邮件地址和PIN号。