Whistleblower WF was fired for refusing to steal money from customers who were losing their homes and was fired for poor performance. He sued for retaliation and is now a millionaire.
credit:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/24/business/wells-fargo-whistleblower-duke-tran.html
After Duke Tran escaped from slavery, but before he became a millionaire, he was a Wells Fargo employee.
He worked at the bank’s debt-collections center near Portland, Ore., talking on the phone to customers who owed Wells Fargo money. It wasn’t glamorous, but the job enabled him to afford a two-story suburban house with mustard-colored aluminum siding. After more than three decades in the United States, Mr. Tran felt that he was the living embodiment of the American dream.
And then it all started to crumble.
In 2014, according to Mr. Tran, his boss ordered him to lie to customers who were facing foreclosure. When Mr. Tran refused, he said, he was fired. He worried that he wouldn’t be able to make his monthly mortgage payments and that he was about to become homeless.
Joining a cadre of former employees claiming they were mistreated for speaking out about problems at the bank, Mr. Tran sued. He argued in court filings that he had been fired in retaliation for blowing the whistle on misconduct at the giant San Francisco-based bank. Mr. Tran said he didn’t want his job back — he wanted Wells Fargo to admit that it had been wrong to fire him and wrong to mislead customers who were facing foreclosure.
It was a long shot. Banks generally are happy to reach private settlements, but loath to publicly admit wrongdoing, which can open them up to litigation. But Mr. Tran, who fled Vietnam as a teenager and then was enslaved by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, wasn’t daunted by long odds.
And so Mr. Tran, who is in his mid-50s and speaks English with a heavy Vietnamese accent and jumbled grammar, became the latest foe to take on Wells Fargo.
The bank already faced widespread condemnation from regulators, lawmakers and enraged customers for opening fake accounts and otherwise deceiving and defrauding its customers.
But the conduct that so unsettled Mr. Tran was not something the bank had previously been accused of; he was alone in leveling the accusations. He said the bank was trying to cover up the fact that it did not have the documents to prove some of its customers owed money it was trying to collect. To further his lawsuit, he opened his life to intense scrutiny, used vacation time at his new job to attend meetings and court dates, and told and retold the story of his experiences at the bank, which maintained that Mr. Tran had been fired for poor performance and that there had been no cover-up of missing documents. He would not go away.
“I have a story to tell,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. “This is a true story. I blew the whistle. They all know.”
Captured at 17
Mr. Tran calls himself Duke now, but his name at birth was Tran Duy Duc. He was born in Vietnam in 1961, the son of a colonel in the South Vietnamese military fighting alongside American troops. Mr. Tran was 13 when, in 1975, the North Vietnamese took over the government and sent his father to a prison camp as punishment for helping the Americans. When released four years later, Mr. Tran’s father paid to sneak Mr. Tran over the Cambodian border.
“You have to leave,” his father told him.
As soon as he got to Cambodia, though, Mr. Tran was captured by fighters for the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. They forced him to drink vinegar, believing he had swallowed gold and family jewels that the vinegar would help expel. Then they made the 17-year-old their slave, forcing him to dig wells.
“Sometimes the soldiers got drunk and took me out and put AK-47s to my head so I would pass out,” Mr. Tran said.
Eight months after he was caught, Mr. Tran’s captors traded him to aid workers who carried humanitarian supplies. He still remembers the items that bought his freedom: a kilo of rice, two boxes of canned tuna, two boxes of sardines in tomato sauce, antibiotics and some other medical supplies.
The aid workers took him to Thailand. From there, the International Organization for Migration helped him reach the United States.
“I am so grateful,” Mr. Tran said. “Here I am, an American citizen.”
His first job in America was scrubbing pots in a restaurant kitchen. Soon after that, he got his first call center job, in the payment processing division of a local bank. He said in an interview that he had worked in call centers for a total of 25 years.
In 2002, he began working in a call center for Wells Fargo’s collections unit in Vancouver, Wash. In March 2013, he transferred to another Wells Fargo unit, the home equity division, in nearby Beaverton, Ore.
Mr. Tran was proud of his work. In an interview, he described himself as “a really model employee” who got internal recognition at Wells for his good work.
The division was responsible for a portfolio of home-equity loans that Wells Fargo had bought from another company at the peak of the financial crisis in 2008. As the bank examined the loans in 2013, employees realized that Wells Fargo was missing some of the paperwork that proved the borrowers owed money to the bank.