Consumer complaint received 2021-03-18
Company: WELLS FARGO & COMPANY
State: CA
Product: Checking or savings account
Sub-product: Checking account
Issue: Problem with a lender or other company charging your account
Sub-issue: Transaction was not authorized

Complaint:
At the end of XX/XX/2020, a thief created counterfeit checks using my bank account number and forged my name on the checks to withdraw money from my account. There were 13 checks totaling {$31000.00} written in seven weeks between XX/XX/XXXX and XX/XX/XXXX. Wells Fargo did not detect the fraud on my account despite the following red flags that should have alerted the bank : 1. The signature on the fake checks bore absolutely NO resemblance to mine. It wasnt even close. 
2. All the fraudulent checks had check numbers that had already been used by me, most within 6 months previous. 
3. Most of the check amounts were abnormally high for my banking history. Seven of them were over {$2500.00} with two being for {$6000.00}. My house payment is usually my highest expense and it isnt even {$2500.00}. 
4. Several of the fraudulent checks were deposited on the same day and some were within one day of each other. This should have been a red flag. Within 7 weeks they had withdrawn {$31000.00} all written to the same person. To say this is an abnormally high amount of money to be withdrawn from my account in such a short period of time for the same person is a major understatement. 
5. The fraudulent checks all bore the same persons name, XXXX XXXX. I use checks for paying the same monthly utility and credit card bills, not people. This was a major abnormality in my 30 years of using this account. 
6. The fraudulent checks increased the volume of checks closing against my account in XX/XX/2020 by 100 %. This was highly unusual. 
7. The fraudulent checks were on paper stock that doesnt look like mine which I have been using for over 20 years. 
8. The thief used my checking account as a back door to my credit card. They stole money I didnt even have by overdrawing my checking account and activating my Wells Fargo credit card overdraft protection. Yet even the checks repeatedly overdrawing my account didnt get Wells Fargos attention. ( Wells Fargo did not send an alert text to my husbands phone for the overdrafts. His last text alert from them was on XX/XX/2020, 2.5 months before the fraud began. Neither did they email or call to alert me that my account overdrafted {$9000.00} onto my credit card ) All of the points above should have alerted the bank to fraud on my account as it is their business to daily oversee my financial transactions and they were in the best position to do so. Wells Fargo advertises its checking account by stating, Your account comes with 24/7 fraud monitoring and secure options to make purchases, send money, and pay bills. As the manager of our account, Wells Fargo had the best opportunity to catch the fraud and stop it, but they did not. A Wells Fargo representative from the Wells Fargo Executive Office told me that the bank has no obligation to site examine items that close against a customers account. When asked what protection the bank provides for my checking account, she told me that they rely on me to check my account every 30 days. 

I did identify and report the fraud within 30 days of the statement which had 11 of the thirteen fraudulent checks. However it was 40 days from the first two fraudulent charges so the bank is using that as an excuse not to refund my money. 

According to 7 American Jurisprudence, page 371, section 516 : " A bank is under an obligation to its depositor to use care in scrutinizing checks paid in order to detect forgeries, and to render its accounts to prevent the perpetration of frauds upon its depositor. Therefore, if a bank, in the exercise of proper care, could have discovered the alteration or forgery of a customer 's checks, it can not throw the loss caused by paying them upon the depositor merely because he failed to examine his account. Or, stating the rule in terms of negligence, a bank which is guilty of negligence in failing to discover an alteration or forgery can not avoid liability on the ground that the depositor was negligent in failing to examine his balanced passbook, statement of account, or returned checks. ( Sommer v. Bank of Italy, supra ; Frankini v. Bank of America, supra ; National Dredging Co. v. President, etc., Farmers ' Bank, supra ; Leather Manufacturers ' Bank v. Morgan, 117 U.S. 96 [ 6 S. Ct. 657, 29 L. Ed . 811 ]. ) I contacted Wells Fargo several days after filing the fraud claim and learned that they hadnt even looked at the case yet. The Wells Fargo representative I spoke with stated that she would put an urgent note on the case to get it looked at more quickly. This delay of one week gave the thief ample time to realize my account had been closed and remove their money from the XXXX  XXXX XXXX account they were depositing the fraudulent checks into. The Wells Fargo fraud department later reported to me that there was no money recovered so they were not obligated to return any funds to me. Wells Fargo has also denied my request to dispute or remove the overdraft charges the thief caused on my credit card of over {$9000.00}. 

It is shocking to me that somebody can create counterfeits with a fake signature that bears absolutely no resemblance to mine and repeatedly use them to deposit unusually large sums of money totaling over {$31000.00} into their account over seven weeks without my bank noticing this gross abnormality. In my 30 years of banking history with this Wells Fargo checking account, Ive never written checks for 30 percent of my annual income in seven weeks.

Contrary to Wells Fargos claim that the loss is my fault for not notifying them within 30 days of the first fraudulent charges on my checking account, 7 American Jurisprudence, page 371, section 516 clearly states that it is the banks responsibility to scrutinize checks to detect forgeries on its depositors account. Wells Fargo did not do this and stated so. In fact, they did not appear to have any fraud monitoring measures in place at all. Therefore, the burden of the loss should be born completely by the bank because of their negligence.

Company public response: Company has responded to the consumer and the CFPB and chooses not to provide a public response
Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation