On September 8, 2016, the fraudulent and illegal activities of Wells Fargo were revealed to the general public when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Los Angeles City Attorney, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OOC) fined Wells Fargo $185 million, due to allegations that the company opened or applied for more than 2 million bank accounts or credit cards without customers' knowledge or consent between May 2011 and July 2015.  

The strategy of cross-selling is the practice that was ultimately used during this fraud. Cross-selling is where one attempts to sell multiple products to consumers.  Later estimations that came out in mid-2017, increased the number of fraudulent accounts and cards created to approximately 3.5 million instead of the 2 million that was estimated when the scandal first broke.

The toxic sales culture and cross-selling strategy of Wells Fargo and its impact on its customers were first documented by the Wall Street Journal back in 2011. In 2013, the Los Angeles Times published an investigative article that detailed the intense pressure on Wells Fargo bank managers and individual banker employees to meet the extremely aggressive and "mathematically impossible" sales quotas that the company set. The sheer pressure and demand from supervisors and Wells Fargo as a whole led to employees opening these illegal accounts and cards without customer consent.

In the LA Times article published back in 2013, Chief Operating Officer (COO) Timothy Sloan said that he was not aware of any overbearing or toxic sales culture at Wells Fargo. Sloan would go on to replace John Stumpf as CEO of Wells Fargo after Stumpf was ultimately pressured into resigning in the aftermath of the scandal. 

Wells Fargo employees were pressured to open credit cards for customers that already had pre-approval without their consent. Employees would use their own personal contact information when filling out these applications in order to keep these customers from finding out about these cards and accounts.

Wells Fargo employees also opened fraudulent checking and savings accounts, even going as far as sometimes moving money out of the customers' legitimate accounts into these illegal accounts. These employees also used a process known as "pinning" to create these illegal accounts. The employees would set the customer's PIN to the number "0000" in order to control the account and enroll them in programs like online banking so that no physical bank statements were sent to customers.

Even more drastic measures were taken by employees to meet the company's impossible demands. Some employees even enrolled homeless people in financial accounts that accrued fees. 

In December 2016, the media reported that Wells Fargo employees also issued insurance policies such as life insurance policies by Prudential Financial and renters insurance policies by Assurant without customers' knowledge or consent.