In September 2016, Wells Fargo agreed to pay $185M in fines and return $5 million in fees wrongly charged to customers because of unethical sales practices. (Zoltners, Sinha, & Lorimer, 2016). Wells Fargo, over several years, opened over 2 million bank and credit card accounts without customers’ permission, or knowledge. The deception took several years to uncover because these unauthorized accounts generated only small, unnoticeable monthly fees that most people did not recognize or become alarmed over when they were recognized on statements. Over time, however, these fees became more visible as the total value of the fees became large and the scheme was uncovered.
Zoltners, Sinah, and Lorimer (2016), suggests that “much of the blame gets
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Wells Fargo’s behavior caused harm to many of their clients. To attempt to provide perspective to the amount of harm from their acts, they had to pay back over $5M in improper fees to clients. Wells Fargo also completely ignored the second point stated in the Marketer’s Ethical Norms section of the code where a marketer agrees to foster trust by exercising good faith, fair dealing, and avoiding deception. Some clients may never be won back over by Wells Fargo, yet others may discount the entire episode as a transgression attributed to being human. Unfortunately, my opinion is that, as a society, we are too unforgiving of unethical behavior and we actually license such poor behavior throughout society. I would also suggest, by selling unnecessary bank products, or selling product that aren’t appropriate for a given client, Wells Fargo also violated the the AMA’s ethical value of “Transparency”. If Wells Fargo was acting with transparency when cross selling to grow client engagement, they would have explained risks, component substitutions or other foreseeable eventualities that could affect customers or their perception of the purchase decision. That all appears to have been ignored when bank representatives willingly sold products that were not right for some