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Wells Fargo fires employees for false keyboard activity
US banking giant Wells Fargo has fired several employees following allegations that employees were faking keyboard activities to trick the company into thinking they were working when they were not.
It’s not yet clear how the issue was discovered or whether it was specifically related to people working from home.
The U.S. bank said employees were fired or resigned “following review of allegations involving simulated keyboard activity, creating the impression of active work.”
New rules recently came into effect in the US which mean that brokers working from home must be inspected every three years.
A company spokeswoman said: “Wells Fargo holds its employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior.”
In 2022, Wells Fargo said it adopted a hybrid, flexible work model, with employees allowed to work from home at times.
Some large companies have used increasingly sophisticated tools to monitor employees since remote work expanded during the Covid pandemic.
These services can track keystrokes and eye movements, take screenshots, and record which websites are visited.
But technology has also evolved to evade surveillance, including so-called “mouse jigglers” that aim to make computers appear to be in active use and widely available.
According to Amazon, where they can be found for less than $10, thousands have been sold in the last month.
Bloomberg, which first reported the move based on a document filed by Wells Fargo with the U.S. Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, said more than a dozen people were affected.
The BBC confirmed six cases where staff were dismissed after review and one case where a person resigned voluntarily after being confronted with the complaints.
Many of them had worked for Wells Fargo for less than five years.
Many companies, especially in the financial sector, are encouraging employees to return to the office.
Remote work has remained popular since the pandemic, but numbers have been declining.
In the US, just under 27% of paid days last month were work-from-home days, compared with more than 60% at the height of the pandemic in 2020, according to a survey of teachers at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). ). ) School of Business, Stanford and University of Chicago.
This spring, about 13% of full-time employees in the U.S. were working entirely remotely and another 26% were using a hybrid arrangement, according to researchers.