Anyone else would have gone to jail…
Co-conspirators created millions of fake bank accounts and over half a million fake credit card accounts. More than 5,300 people were complicit.
But it wasn’t some shady, payday-lending scheme. It wasn’t even a Nigerian boiler-room operation.
Instead, it was a well-coordinated plan to commit massive consumer fraud. And the perpetrator was America’s fourth-largest bank: Wells Fargo.
In 2016, the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) accused the bank of secretly creating 3 million unauthorized bank and credit card accounts for five years.
Wells Fargo employees also submitted applications for 565,443 credit card accounts without customers’ knowledge.
The CFPB hit the bank with $185 million in fines. And it ordered the bank to refund $5 million to customers.
But it was a mere slap on the wrist for a company with a nearly $230 billion market cap.
And if you think Wells Fargo learned its lesson, think again…
Last month, the company admitted it had to refund some customers for monthly account service fees. It blamed the error on some type of “confusion.”
The bank hasn’t disclosed how much money is on the line. But reports say it may have collected hundreds of millions of dollars in service fees.
Friends, the big banks aren’t on your side. And they can’t be trusted. That’s why I’ve always preached that you should take control of your own financial future.
One way to do so is with cryptos. And today, I’ll show you why you need to add this asset to your wealth-building strategy…
Banks Can’t Be Trusted
Over the years, I’ve seen trusted banks like Lehman Brothers, Countrywide, and Wachovia collapse after lying about their balance sheets.
Hundreds of thousands of small businesses were affected. Millions of customers saw their lives turned upside down.
And fines don’t seem to work. Even after paying about $20 billion per year in fines over the last 10 years, big banks are still lying to their customers.
One quick look at the total valuation of U.S. bank stocks reveals why. Their combined market cap of $2.2 trillion easily dwarfs the fines they pay.
Here’s the hard truth: The illicit profits coming from document tampering are too profitable for banks to ignore.
Just look at Wells Fargo. It’s been fined millions of dollars for falsifying millions of customer accounts… mortgage records… and auto insurance records – all to pump up fees. Yet it continues its bad behavior.
What conclusion are we to draw… other than it appears banks have made a business decision to break the rules to pump up profits and pay fines later if they get caught?
Now, in a blockchain world, banks could never commit this fraud.
Blockchain is the underlying technology of cryptos. And records secured by blockchains are tamper-proof.
It’s no wonder bankers and the old guard are so scared. In a blockchain-enabled world, we don’t need their institutions…
Be Your Own Bank With Bitcoin
The creators of bitcoin designed it to be a truly decentralized network. So it doesn’t rely on one central point of control.
This model is secure because data is distributed across a global network of 10,000 computers – making information impossible to tamper with.
One upside of distributed networks is they’re immune to government control. For instance, no government has ever been able to shut down the bitcoin network.
Another is, it gives bitcoin holders control of their assets. As long as you have your private keys, you have custody of your bitcoin.
Just about any other investment (other than precious metals) relies on trusting a third party. We have to trust banks to hold our cash… brokerage firms to hold our stocks… and local governments to hold our property deed records.
The problem is, banks, brokers, and governments have proven they’ll violate our trust. They know there’s nothing we can do about it.
This is the opportunity for blockchain to change the world.
We envision a future where we’ll see new financial institutions built on public blockchains (such as bitcoin and Ethereum) spring up.
Their documents will be tamper-proof. They won’t be able to move customer money without approval. And they won’t be able to engage in “off-the-books” transactions that destroyed Lehman, Countrywide, and Wachovia.
This new trend of decentralized finance (or “DeFi” for short) is something my team and I are following closely.
In the meantime, the next best thing is to get your feet wet with a little crypto exposure. Bitcoin and ether will be two big beneficiaries of the DeFi movement.
Owning a little bit of each today could end up being as life-changing an investment as owning the two biggest banks in America – JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America – when they went public for $7.92 in 1972 and $1.94 in 1978, respectively.
Assuming you reinvested dividends, a $500 investment in each back then would be worth more than $520,011 today – a 51,901% return.
So if you’re a lover of personal freedom, you owe it to yourself to get educated on how cryptos can liberate you from the limitations… onerous fees… and stifling regulations of our current financial system.
Let the Game Come to You!
Teeka Tiwari
Editor, Palm Beach Daily
P.S. In my Palm Beach Confidential newsletter, I’ve found five tiny cryptos (some trading for as little as a few cents) that could soar so high, so rapidly… they could potentially help you turn $500 into $5 million in as little as 300 days.
And one of them has figured out how to secure the world’s digital documents for just fractions of a penny. Its ease of use is one of the reasons this project was able to sign a deal with one of the world’s biggest tech firms.
Based on our estimates, if this project captures just 10% of the global information security market, it’d be enough to turn $500 into $727,136. And you can learn more about it right here.