Forty-five people who worked in Wells Fargo’s Florida branches have stepped forward to join a wrongful termination and retaliation lawsuit filed in September by Los Angeles employment lawyer Jonathan Delshad. It was the first such case to be brought after the fines. He provided Bloomberg with a state-by-state breakdown of the roughly 500 potential plaintiffs vetted by his firm so far, showing only California has more, with 144.
The complaint, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, seeks class-action status for employees ousted or demoted for missing sales quotas while refusing to cheat customers.
Training Sessions
Some of Sotoodeh’s team also got involved with new branches in the southeast. In 2010, members of his staff went to train Wachovia bankers working under Harmon. Soon after the coaches left, the Wachovia staff discovered debit cards in their mailboxes for Wells Fargo accounts they hadn’t requested, one person said. The bankers learned months later that members of Sotoodeh’s team had used local customers’ identities to help meet sales goals, the person said.
Wells Fargo’s internal crackdown intensified in the years after Sotoodeh handed Young the swath of branches stretching from San Bernardino County to San Diego.
In 2011, the bank created a “report card” to help track sales practices in California, and it delegated a team to sift data for patterns suggesting accounts were bogus, Stumpf told the Senate panel. Two years later, that group launched an “intensive investigation” in Los Angeles and neighboring Orange County into a practice known as “simulated funding,” he said. At the time, Sotoodeh oversaw both areas.
Employees were opening bogus accounts, then depositing funds temporarily to make it look like customers were using them, Stumpf testified. He conceded to lawmakers that sales abuses were especially prevalent in Southern California, and not just because the bank’s presence there was large. Both the report card and funding review later expanded nationwide.
Climbing Ranks
Other managers from California also assumed leadership posts overseeing broader U.S. regions. Pam Conboy supervised the San Gabriel Valley to the east of Los Angeles when Tolstedt was picked to run the state in 2000. Tolstedt promoted Conboy within the state, and later flew her around the country to teach strategies for increasing sales, managers say. She now oversees Arizona, Nevada and Utah. Conboy didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.
Conboy, Sotoodeh and Stevens have outlasted many of their colleagues. Of the almost 70 regional supervisors listed in the company’s 1999 annual report, they’re among fewer than 10 whose names still appeared in an updated hierarchy posted this year.