Wells Fargo's fires staff for faking keyboard activity

By Louis Goss

Wells Fargo & Company has fired more than a dozen employees after investigating claims they were using fake keyboard movements to make it seem like they were working.

The employees in Wells Fargo's wealth management division were discharged this month following a "review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work," filings to the U.S. Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra) show.

Several of the fired staffers appear to be relatively junior employees working in hybrid and remote jobs linked to Wells Fargo's Charlotte, North Carolina offices, according to publicly available information viewed by MarketWatch.

Wells Fargo failed to immediately respond to MarketWatch's requests for comment.

The widespread uptake of home working practices during COVID-19 led to a sudden surge in the popularity of various devices used to trick the software employers use to monitor staff while they work remotely.

Mouse jigglers and similar devices are now widely available on e-commerce websites including Amazon.com, where they are marketed as being "100% undetectable" due to their ability to "simulate realistic random mouse movements."

Wells Fargo's (WFC) investigations follow a wider crackdown on homeworking across the banking sector that has seen the world's top banks place increasing pressure on staff to return to offices.

In May, Citigroup (C), HSBC (HSBC), and Barclays (UK:BARC) told staffers they must start working from the office five days a week, after Finra said it would be reintroducing rules on homeworking that were previously suspended during COVID-19.

In 2018, Wells Fargo fired more than a dozen employees for allegedly violating the bank's expenses policy by altering the time stamps on receipts for food ordered to the company's offices.

The Wells Fargo staff in its New York, San Francisco, and Charlotte, NC offices were accused of doctoring the receipts to ensure they could claim money back for food delivered earlier than the bank's expenses policy allowed them to.

In October 2023, a financial crime analyst at Citibank's London offices was also fired from his job for falsely stating that meals and coffees he bought for himself and his partner on a trip to Amsterdam were only for himself.

-Louis Goss

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06-14-24 0601ET

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