More From Wells Fargo Playbook of Dirty Deeds

Wells Fargo is now accused of forcing its customers to pay for unnecessary auto insurance that drove some of them so far into a financial spiral that their vehicles were repossessed. First, there was the ‘account scandal’, in which the bank’s employees opened up some 2.1 million checking and credit card accounts without customers’ permission over about half a decade, and the bank paid $185 million to regulators to settle. And now, there’s an ‘insurance scandal’, in which 800,000 of Wells Fargo’s auto loan customers were charged for car insurance they did not need. Wells Fargo is estimating the mistaken auto insurance sales would cost the bank $80 million in damages. Catherine Pulley, a spokesperson for Wells Fargo, sent the following statement for this story:

“Wells Fargo discontinued its Collateral Protection Insurance (CPI) program in September 2016 after finding inadequacies in vendor processes and our internal controls that negatively impacted some customers. We announced a plan to remediate auto loan customers who may have been financially harmed due to issues related to auto CPI policies placed between 2012-2017. We are very sorry for the inconvenience this caused impacted customers and we are in the process of notifying them and making things right.”

Bottom Line: Wells Fargo is being sued, again.