That person said that the banking giant had been served with subpoenas, but that the prosecutors have not decided whether the case warrants criminal or civil charges.
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Prosecutors from NY and San Francisco have begun a probe into the troubled bank six days after it paid $185 million to settle a regulatory probe that found it had opened 2 million bogus customer accounts to meet sales quotas.
The investigation escalate an already embarrassing episode for San Francisco-based Wells Fargo.
The probe, which is led by the U.S. attorneys from NY and California, is also looking at whether senior executives willfully turned a blind eye to the practices, said the Journal, which cited unnamed sources.
Wells Fargo has been hit hard by allegations its staff opened more than 2 million bank accounts and credit cards for customers without their consent in a bid to meet internal sales goals.
The largest USA bank by market capitalization last week said it would pay $185 million in penalties and $5 million to customers that regulators say were pushed into fee-generating accounts they never requested.
Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf speaks at the Bay Area Council Outlook Conference on May 17, 2016 in San Francisco.
Wells Fargo fired 5,300 workers over the matter and said it would eliminate sales goals regulators linked to its practice of cross-selling products.
He said the consultant found that 115,000 of the unauthorised accounts had been charged fees. “I don’t want them here if they don’t represent the culture of the company”, John Stumpf, the company’s long-time chief executive, said in an interview with The Washington Post Tuesday.
“The 1 percent [of the payroll] that did it wrong, who we fired, terminated, in no way reflects the great work the other vast majority of the people do”, Stumpf told the Journal.
Stumpf is expected to testify before the Senate Banking Committee next week on the affair.
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Wells Fargo’s biggest investor is Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. “Even a seven year old gets it”. Wells Fargo, which is grappling with the fallout from claims that its employees created fake customer accounts, slumped 3.3% to close at $46.96 on Tuesday in NY. A spokesperson for that office declined to comment. That reduced the firm’s market value to $236.9 billion, compared with $240.3 billion for JPMorgan. They are down almost 8 percent since the scandal broke last week.
