Wells Fargo Shares Private Info on 50,000 Clients and Advisors: Report

A former Wells Fargo advisor whose brother is suing the bank received private information about an estimated 50,000 clients and an undisclosed number of its registered representatives.

The news, reported by The New York Times late Friday includes clients’ names, Social Security numbers, assets under management, portfolio performance and related data. One of the clients is “a well-known hedge fund billionaire who had at least $23 million invested through Wells Fargo Advisors,” the paper said.

As for the advisors, the 1.4-gigabyte files contained details about their performance, compensation and clients. One advisor’s record, for instance, had the full list of clients and trailing-12-month commissions, which were $1.5 million.

“There are thousands of documents in here that the public should never see,” Sinderbrand told the paper, noting that the affected wealth-management clients have some “tens of billions of dollars invested through Wells Fargo.”

Privacy laws at both the state and federal level restrict the release of personal information to outside parties. In 2016, about 1.4 billion records were breached during close to 1,800 incidents, according to data compiled by Gemalto, a data-security tech firm.

The Wells Fargo documents seen by Sinderbrand were obtained via his attorney who received them from an attorney for Wells Fargo as part of a response to a subpoena in a defamation lawsuit the bank brought in New Jersey against one of his brothers, who works for Wells Fargo, according to the news report.

Data Breach

The private information tied the Wells Fargo clients and advisors was sent by Angela A. Turiano, a lawyer with Bressler, Amery & Ross, in Florham Park, N.J., to one of Sinderbrand’s attorneys, Aaron Zeisler.

“Obviously this was done in error and we would request that you return the CD asap so that it can be properly redacted,” Turiana said in an email to Sinderbrand. She also described the disclosures as “inadvertent,” the newspaper says.