Wells Fargo fired a dozen people accused of faking keyboard strokes
Allison Morrow
Analysis by Allison Morrow, CNN
3 minute read
Updated 1:49 PM EDT, Fri June 14, 2024



Wells Fargo has spent years trying to improve its internal controls following a fake-accounts scandal that cost the bank billions of dollars and serious reputational damage.
Wells Fargo has spent years trying to improve its internal controls following a fake-accounts scandal that cost the bank billions of dollars and serious reputational damage. Stephanie Keith/Bloomberg/Getty Images/File
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New York
CNN
—
The pandemic may have released us from the tyranny of the five-day-a-week office schedule. But the grip of America’s busy-work culture is proving harder to shake.

See here: Wells Fargo this week disclosed that it had fired more than a dozen employees for “simulation of keyboard activity,” Bloomberg reported, citing filings to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. CNN confirmed that multiple people were let go after a review of allegations that they created an “impression of active work.”

In other words, they were faking work, perhaps with the kind of mouse jiggler that you can buy online for $20.

Those devices — which keep your screen active and move your cursor in convincingly random ways — took off during the early days of the pandemic. With employees no longer huddled together under fluorescent lighting, eating sad desk salads, bosses suddenly had to wonder whether their teams were actually working or slacking off.

Even though most workers said they were more productive from home, many executives adopted “bossware” to monitor their staff’s laptops. (And to be fair, yes — sometimes we did step away, selfishly tending to our own personal business, like walking the dog or staring out the window while contemplating our mortality. We hope you can forgive us.)

At any rate, some bankers over at Wells Fargo seem to have gotten caught last month. It’s not clear whether they were working from home or from a beach, or what they were doing instead of working. A bank spokesperson declined to offer more details about the firings, saying only that “Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior.”

I have two immediate thoughts

• Oh, come on, the highest standards? (More on that in a moment.)
• We are four years into this remote/hybrid experiment, and some bosses still haven’t figured out how to treat their workers like adults.

“The sad part is that employees feel the need to purchase and use a mouse jiggler,” Ashley Herd, founder of management training firm Manager Method, tells me. “And that’s a symptom of a much larger problem.”

In Wells Fargo’s case, managerial mistrust would be understandable, given the bank’s history.

Since 2016, Wells has spent billions of dollars settling civil and criminal charges related to a multiyear scheme that led to more than 2 million fake accounts being opened without customers’ consent or knowledge — a practice that began when managers began setting unrealistic sales goals for employees.

Last year, the former head of the bank’s retail operation was sentenced to three years of probation, while the bank’s former CEO was banned from the industry.

Since then, Wells has been trying to reform its own internal culture while trying to repair its brand. It’s not hard to understand why it would want to keep some close tabs on its roughly 200,000 employees.

Banks in particular have strict controls on work-issued devices because the industry is so tightly regulated.

But firing people over mouse movers may not be the best way to foster a culture of trust and inclusion.

“Managers often assume the worst when they see someone’s away, and so they’re looking for any type of data to show that that’s true,” Herd says. “So, team members are going to innovate around that.”

—CNN’s Matt Egan contributed reporting.

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'Was I molested. I think so': Snopes' update on Ashley Biden diary fact-check spells trouble for Joe Biden
JOSEPH MACKINNON
MAY 14, 2024
The entry in a sexual trauma section concerning Joe Biden's alleged inappropriate behavior toward his daughter was evidently real all along.
Aimee Harris moved into the former residence of Ashley Biden in Delray Beach, Florida, in 2020. Just as Hunter Biden abandoned a laptop containing damning information at a Delaware computer repair shop, Ashley Biden had left behind a diary containing troubling allegations that implicated then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in possible abuse.

After finding the diary, Harris worked in concert with Robert Kurlander to sell the document, ultimately, to Project Veritas. Kurlander and Harris pleaded guilty years later to conspiracy to transport supposedly stolen property across state lines.

Project Veritas refrained from publishing it, both out of concern for doing more harm to Ashley Biden than her father may already have and the organization's inability to "corroborate the allegation further." The National File, however, published a digital copy it allegedly received from a Project Veritas employee in October 2020.

Just as social media dutifully hid the Hunter Biden laptop story from the public ahead of the 2020 election, Politifact indicated that damning posts about the Democrat in the diary were flagged as misinformation.

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Scam of the day – June 10, 2024 – NY Attorney General Issues a New Warning About Romance Scams

Steven Weisman, Esq.

June 9

I have been warning you about romance scams for many years. Romance scams generally follow a familiar pattern with the scammers establishing relationships with people, generally women, online through various legitimate dating websites and social media using fake names, locations and images. The FBI has issued a warning about a new trend in romance scams in which the scammer tells his victim that he or she has inside knowledge about cryptocurrency investing and directs the victim to a phony website that purports to be a legitimate cryptocurrency trading site. Not long after "investing" in the cryptocurrencies provided, the victim soon finds that there is no investment and that she or he has lost all of the invested money. This scam originated in China in 2019 and is called sha zhu pan or pig butchering in English. The name is derived from the practice of luring in victims, "fattening them up" by convincing them to continually "invest" more money and then stealing all of the money.

While anyone can be the victim of a romance scam, according to the FBI, the elderly, women and people who have been widowed are particular vulnerable. Most romance scams are online and involve some variation of the person you meet through an online dating site or social media quickly falling in love with you and then, under a wide variety of pretenses, asking for money. Since 2019 approximately half of the reported instances of the romance scam have started on social media, particularly Facebook and Instagram rather than on dating sites or dating apps according to the FTC.

A new development in romance scams is confirming my motto of "things aren't as bad as you think... they are far worse." Recently a scam group called the "Yahoo Boys" based in Nigeria is using artificial intelligence to change their facial features in Zoom videos to appear to be the person they are posing as in the romance scam. They also can use AI to change their voice and accent to sound legitimate and while doing a video conference with a romance scammer in the past was a good way to see if the person was actually who they claimed to be, now scammers using this technology will be very difficult to recognize as scammers.

Recently New York Attorney General Letitia James issued a new warning about romance scams which you can read here. https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2024/att...ance-scams

TIPS

There are various red flags to help you identify romance scams. I describe many of them in detail in my book "The Truth About Avoiding Scams." The most important thing to remember is to always be skeptical of anyone who falls in love with you quickly online without ever meeting you and early into the relationship who then asks you to send money to assist them with a wide range of phony emergencies.

Here are a few other things to look for to help identify an online romance scam. Often their profile picture is stolen from a modeling website on the Internet. If the picture looks too professional and the person looks too much like a model, you should be wary. You also can check on the legitimacy of photographs or video images by seeing if they have been used elsewhere by doing a reverse image search using google.images.com or websites such as tineye.com.

Recently, the dating sites Match, Tinder, Hinge and Plenty of Fish started a new public awareness program to help people recognize romance scams. One tip they give is to use the verification check on your matches to help confirm they are the person who appears in the profile photo.

I used to advise people to do a Zoom meeting because romance scammers do not look like the photos they send, but as I indicated above, AI now allows sophisticated scammers to make their video image look legitimate. It should be noted that most romance scammers don't have that level of sophistication.

If you are not a subscriber to Scamicide.com and would like to receive free daily emails with the Scam of the day, all you need to do is sign up for free using this link. https://scamicide.com/scam-of-the-day/

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i shall come back and forth to the forum. in the interim, i got me some moving to so. HUGS.

you looking for something in particular ??