Wells Fargo chief quits after fake account scandal

New York

THE scandal engulfing Wells Fargo toppled its chairman and chief executive on Wednesday as John Stumpf announced his departure from the company, effective immediately. The move was a swift and stunning fall for an executive whose bank made it through the 2008 financial crisis relatively unscathed only to be undone by a phony account sales scandal that pervaded its community banking division and percolated under the surface for years.

The bank's misdeeds were fundamentally simple: Under intense pressure to meet aggressive sales goals, employees created sham accounts using the names - and sometimes, the actual money - of the bank's real customers, and in some cases the customers did not disc…