Wells Fargo Faces Angry Questions About Profiling Latinos

*This is a strange story. Wells Fargo is embroiled in a controversy about bank employees opening accounts and charging fees without customers’ consent. Further investigation has found that those employees targeted Latinos. VL

By Jeff Green JeffAGreen, Laura J Keller LauraJKeller, Kartikay Mehrotra KartikayM, Bloomberg (5.5 minute read)

Matthew Castro says he’s sorry about what he did at Wells Fargo & Co., and even sorrier about the people he did it to: Latinos not so different from himself.

Castro, 41, says he is one of the thousands of people Wells Fargo has fired for secretly opening accounts without customers’ consent.

But for Castro, the scandal that has toppled the bank’s longtime leader, John Stumpf, cuts especially deep. He says he and colleagues seized every opportunity to open sham accounts for Latinos, many of them recent immigrants.

“There would be times the client would sit down and leave without even knowing they had these new accounts,” says Castro, whose father came to the U.S. from Colombia. He says he tried to lessen his guilt by doing volunteer work. READ MORE