So why aren’t people being dragged to jail:
Bank of America has been ordered to pay out $150m (£116m) in penalties after it was found to have opened credit cards without customers’ permission.
Regulators also discovered the bank “double-dipped” fees from customers and withheld promised reward bonuses.
Too Big To Fail = Too Big To Jail
More seriously, that activity is not a crime. It raises civil issues between the parties - a tort if i remember my business law course from many years ago. So the business pays a monetary penalty and no one goes to jail.
Much like what happened to Wells Fargo a while back when they did the same thing.
—Peter
Excuse me the charges were not brought. Criminal fraud is such a thing.
You can not forge documents and then send out credit cards. You can not not sign for credit cards and then send them out as if the marketing arm of BoA is not stealing directly from the bank’s assets. The bank should be charging their own executives for criminal fraud.
This is like waiting for the church to report to the police on things.
Last week BoA and Merrill sent me that I have accounts with them. I never opened either account with them. My problem is I am also worried that the letters are phishing for my SS. I called numbers in the letters and was asked for my SS to confirm if the accounts were mine. I can not trust that at all. I went into the local branch. The Merrill manager turned a little paler and shakier but said I do not have accounts with them.
If I committed forgery for financial gain I’d be in trouble somewhere.
I don’t think they did either of those things. You don’t need a signature to open a credit card account, you just need an address and SS number, which the employees had access too. The employees then got a performance bonus for signing up lots of people.
The other component was that BofA charged their customers a bunch of bogus fees.
I’m no solicitor but someone must have ticked an ‘electronic’ box agreeing to the terms and conditions:
Forgery refers to faking a signature without permission, making a false document or another object, or changing an existing document or another object without authorization. The most common form of forgery is signing someone else’s name to a check, but objects, data, and documents can also be forged. The same is true of legal contracts, historical papers, art objects, diplomas, licenses, certificates, and identification cards.
Perhaps someone who is legally trained can comment?
This is not done by the employees in a vacuum.
Wells Fargo it ran all the way up to the CEO.
The executives suite on the marketing side are always aware of this sort of thing. It is a love fest. It is called bad judgement.
Google search because you are right the SS was used.
Using someone else’s SSN is a federal crime and could result in up to 15 years in jail .
see number 1 because it is all forgery not just the signature part.
What are the 3 types of forgery?
The Three Types of Forgery