You may recall that last year Wells Fargo admitted to charging as many as 570,000 consumers for car insurance they didn't need.
The bank apologized and agreed to pay back all of its affected customers. But after waiting on his refund for months, one Carrollton man called NBC 5 Responds.
Alex Kanadjian had his car financed through Wells Fargo and thought he had a good deal.
"Signed up, was good rate and I went ahead and said, ok, let's do it. I went ahead and signed up auto debit," he explained.
Kanadjian said Wells Fargo charged his account once a month and everything seemed to be smooth sailing. But last year he got a letter informing him that the bank may owe him money.
"Unbeknownst to me, they placed an insurance policy on my car when I already had insurance," Kanadjian explained.
Here's what happened: Well Fargo admitted that it purchased insurance on a customer's behalf if there was no evidence the customer already had insurance.
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Kanadjian said he had auto insurance from another company and had no idea that Wells Fargo had charged him for a second insurance policy.
He's among the nearly 570,000 customers who were financially harmed by the bank's "Collateral Protection Insurance" or CPI program.
Last month, Wells Fargo was fined $1 billion for its abusive auto insurance and mortgage practices.
In a statement, Franklin Codel, former head of Wells Fargo Consumer Lending said in part, "We take full responsibility for our failure to appropriately manage the cpi program and are extremely sorry for any harm this caused our customers, who expect and deserve better from us…Upon our discovery, we acted swiftly to discontinue the program and immediately develop a plan to make impacted customers whole."
"It's shameful that a bank would operate like this," Kanadjian said.
After sending in his paperwork, he learned the bank owed him more than $1,500. He said Wells Fargo told him he'd get a check in about 30 days.
But three months went by and the check never came, so he called the NBC 5 Responds team. We reached out to Wells Fargo and the bank responded, apologizing for the delay.
Wells Fargo said "Our CPI remediation outreach is taking place in phases, as we work with customers to understand their situations and make sure we deliver the appropriate refund."
The bank told us it would work with the consumer to make things right, and not long after, he received a check for $1,502. He said he hopes others who were affected by Wells Fargo's practices will soon get their refunds, too.
We heard from another consumer in North Texas whose case was nearly identical to Kanadjian's. Wells Fargo tells us they're working to make things right with that consumer as well.
As for the refund delays the bank says, "this situation has been widely reported and we've developed an remediation program (announced it last summer) And we continue to work with regulators to finalize it. Because the program is ongoing, refund estimates change over time - and we won't know for some time exactly how many customers were impacted."
If you're one of the 570,000 people who may have been affected by this incident, you should have received a letter in the mail from Wells Fargo.
