In congressional hearing rooms and on national television, Wells Fargo & Co. has vowed to make things right for the thousands of customers who were given sham accounts.
The bank's new chief executive, Timothy Sloan, in his first week on the job, said his "immediate and highest priority is to restore trust in Wells Fargo."
But in federal and state courtrooms across the country, Wells Fargo is taking a different tack.
The bank has sought to kill lawsuits that its customers have filed over the creation of as many as 2 million sham accounts by moving the cases into private arbitration -- a legal process that critics say often favors corporations.
Lawyers for the bank's customers say the legal motions are an attempt to limit the bank's accountability for the widespread fraud and deny its customers their day in open court.
Under intense pressure to meet sales goals, Wells employees used customers' personal information to create unauthorized banking and credit card accounts in a far-reaching scandal that has rattled the San Francisco bank to its core, forcing the retirement of its longtime leader, John Stumpf, and angering regulators and politicians of all stripes.
The bank's arbitration push in recent weeks is fanning those flames anew.
"It is ridiculous," said Jennifer Zeleny, who is suing Wells Fargo in federal court in Utah, along with about 80 other customers, over unauthorized accounts. "This is an issue of identity theft -- my identity was used so employees could meet sales goals. This is something that needs to be litigated in a public forum."
In arbitration, consumers often find the odds are stacked against them. The arbitration clauses prevent consumers from banding together to file a lawsuit as a class, forcing them instead to hash out their disputes one by one and blunting one of the most powerful tools that Americans have in challenging harmful and deceitful practices by big companies.
Strict judicial rules limiting conflicts of interest also do not apply in arbitration, enabling some companies to steer cases to friendly arbitrators, according to a 2015 investigation by The New York Times.
Arbitration is also conducted outside public view, and the decisions are nearly impossible to overturn.
Zeleny, a lawyer who lives outside Salt Lake City and opened a Wells Fargo account when she started a new law practice, said it would be impossible for her to agree to arbitrate her dispute over an account that she had never signed up for in the first place.
The bank's counter-argument: The arbitration clauses included in the legitimate contracts customers signed to open bank accounts also cover disputes related to the false ones set up in their names.
Some judges have agreed with this argument, but some lawmakers and others consider it outrageous.
"Wells Fargo's customers never intended to sign away their right to fight back against fraud and deceit," said Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who introduced a bill last week that would prevent Wells Fargo from forcing arbitration in the sham account cases.
Wells Fargo has been winning its legal battles to kill off lawsuits. Judges have ruled that Wells Fargo customers must go to arbitration over the fraudulent accounts.
In dismissing one large case seeking class-action status in California, a federal judge ruled last year that it was not "wholly groundless" that customers could be forced to arbitrate over accounts they had never agreed to. That case is now being settled, according to legal filings.
In a statement, Wells Fargo said it was working with customers to reimburse any improper fees. If the issues are still not resolved, the bank offers free mediation services. Arbitration, the bank said, is a "last resort."
"We want to make sure that no Wells Fargo customer loses a single penny because of these issues," the statement said.
Although the extent of the scandal became known only in September, some fraudulent acts may have started a decade or more ago.
And Wells Fargo has been moving disputes about unauthorized accounts into arbitration for years, which lawyers say may have helped keep the problems from bursting into public view sooner.
Ana Barbara, a Mexican music star who lives in Los Angeles, sued Wells Fargo in June, saying a bank employee had created sham accounts and credit lines in her name and taken out more than $400,000 of her money. To cover his tracks, the employee regularly stopped by Barbara's house and stole Wells Fargo statements from her mailbox, according to her lawsuit.
Devin McRae, Barbara's lawyer, said he would have preferred to try the case in court, where it would generate a trail of public records. But the case was moved into arbitration in September.
"I think it's a major problem when you have a bank that is so large, doing the things that Wells Fargo did on a systematic basis, to be able to keep that under wraps," McRae said.
Business on 12/07/2016