• As a longtime forensic accountant who helps consumer lawyers investigate big financial institutions, Jay Patterson has made a point to do business with a smallish local bank in his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas.
• So, he was startled in June 2022 when he received a bank statement from Wells Fargo showing $12 in an “Everyday Checking” account in his name, an account he didn’t know about and had never opened.
• Patterson immediately called Wells Fargo, a bank he has often scrutinized in his work, and it closed the account. But he continued to investigate, he said, learning troubling things that even he, a finance expert, hadn’t known regarding how banks collect and disperse consumers’ financial data.

Tagged: Banks