As often discussed, a company’s most critical threat is no other than its own employees. IT Security threat is most likely to come from within whether it is negligence, honest mistake or intentional wrongdoing. All of these will lead to one result, data breach which in turn can cause extraction of information, financial loss or system manipulation. In the case of Wells Fargo’s incident occurred this week, the financial giant had to let go 5,300 of its workforce for financial fraud orchestrated internally. According to CNN’s Matt Egan in “5,300 Wells Fargo employees fired over 2 million phony accounts,” Wells Fargo employees submitted applications for more than 565,000 credit card accounts without their customers’ knowledge or consent from which interest charges and overdraft-protection fees, the author states.
Who knows for how long this scam has been really going on? Regardless the time, I give Wells Fargo a lot of credit for uncovering something like this as that proves at least the organization has business/IT governance and security in place against fraud. It can be difficult and time consuming to investigate crimes of this nature. IT and business controls obviously need to be reviewed and improved as they should on regular basis, but at least something exists already to help catch the bad guys. However, that does not prevent Wells Fargo’s reputation from being hurt, loss a lot of money and probably will have to deal will many lawsuits in the process. A much closer monitoring system should be implemented to avoid such an un unfortunate circumstance.
Article can be accessed via:
http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/investing/wells-fargo-created-phony-accounts-bank-fees/