Jay Weaver of the Miami Herald has a must-read piece about what Carlos Gomez, a Wachovia Bank customer, went through after becoming a victim of ID theft by a bank employee, and how he’s suing Wachovia, which has since been taken over by Wells Fargo:
Just before dawn, insistent pounding on the front door jolted the ex-Marine and young father out of bed. Federal agents poured into his Kendall home, pushing his wife aside and rushing to his bedroom. They held guns to his face before slapping him in handcuffs.
“I kept asking, ‘What is going on?’ ” recalled Gomez, who works as a driver for UPS. “I was scared for my life.”
Gomez, busted in a money-laundering scheme, would spend nearly two weeks in a federal detention center and another seven months under house arrest.
It took 222 days before federal prosecutors realized it was all a terrible mistake: A rogue bank worker had stolen his identity.
Thanks in part to Gomez’s own sleuthing, prosecutors eventually discovered he had been wrongfully charged. The Wachovia Bank employee had stolen $1.1 million from customers, then swiped Gomez’s identity to create a checking account under the pilfered name to launder portions of the embezzled proceeds.
Now, nearly three years after the ordeal, Gomez is suing Wachovia for “malicious prosecution.”
Read more on Bellingham Herald.
Picture yourself in his situation. Your bank doesn’t protect you from an insider breach and then gives federal investigators false information about you that gets you charged and detained? And then you have to spend your time and money trying to clear your name because of their failures. Wouldn’t you sue them for the misery they put you through? I sure would.
Gomez’s civil lawyers, Jermaine Lee and Eric Hernandez, claim in a lawsuit filed in September in federal court that Wachovia officials were reckless when they failed to protect Gomez’s “confidential” account and to provide “accurate” information about him to federal authorities.
In a key ruling last month, U.S. District William Dimitrouleas rejected the bank’s bid to throw out the civil case, saying Gomez had “sufficiently alleged” that Wachovia violated its “fiduciary duty” to him by allowing an employee and others “to misuse his private and confidential information to launder monies.” As a result, Gomez’s case is headed for mediation and, if still unresolved, trial.
Good luck, Mr. Gomez. And if any court should try to dismiss this case for lack of ability to show harm, then we need a revolution in this country.