Wells Fargo fires more than a dozen employees for faking work using mouse jigglers and keyboard activity simulation

So you did not notice that they didn't actual do anything...? But were happy that their mouse was moving around...?

This is what I fail to get. You give people things to work on. Why do you want to spy on them instead of just looking at the results? Even if someone spends half the time watching YouTube, if all the work is done... who cares?

The lesson is to work really, really slow
- This is actually exactly the lesson. If the issue in this case was the mouse jiggler, then just working slow would be perfectly fine?! Are they all stupid?
- Finally. My low sensitivity for gaming is about to pay off.
  
  "Did you see that email?"
  
  "My cursor is on its way to check"
- To quote Homer Simpson:
  
  Lisa! If you don't like your job, you don't strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That's the American way.
- There fact that I have been told seriously, more than 0 times, to work more slowly in my life is insane to me.
I know people who use the mouse jiggler. They get all their work done and are good employees.

I'm a manager at a large company and have employees who work mostly from home. I don't bother checking if their picture has a green or yellow mark next to their name. If they respond to my emails quickly and get their overall work done, I'm happy.
- Their productivity is naturally increased because they aren't force to re-authenticate on their laptops because they were inactive for 5 minute while reading a report or going to the bathroom. Or worse, if they have multiple laptops because of security or compliance reasons, and one will inevitably be inactive forcing yet another sign in.
- Ah, a lower end manager I see. The higher ups wouldn't be smart enough to get that.
That's what salaried positions are supposed to be like. You're getting paid for the job, not the hours.
- You’d like to think that, but the last several years have proven beyond a doubt that they’re much more concerned that we’re sitting at our desks during set hours than any actual outcomes.
- No, that's not how employment works in this country. Employers pay people for the right to tell them what to do. You, as an employee, have sold your time to someone else. You are literally paid for the hours. Your employer is paid for the job. You are paid to do the things your employer tells you to do, which usually is part of the job they were paid to do.
  
  Ofc all of this is subject to a whole mess of laws, regulations, policies, and whatever other horseshit HR decides to try. The important lesson is that you as an employee should NEVER put in work beyond the time you are paid to work.
Because it's not about getting work done, it's about having power over your employees.
- Found the answer.
- Slaves is what they want and we fail to provide it to them.
Even if someone spends half the time watching YouTube, if all the work is done... who cares?

They care because it means you could be doing even more work in the time allotted.
- It’s the “if you have time to lean you have time to clean” of the white collar world, why would they be paying the peasants if the toil isn’t visible
- capital sucks up all the surplus value of your labor. you don't get to keep it.
They don't have a real job....

According to the disclosures, the terminated employees worked in Wells Fargo's wealth- and investment-management unit.

Time and time again, these funds don't really beat the average of an index fund.

But the Uber wealthy dont like being lumped together with regular people. So they pay commissions to get the same performance, resulting in less profits than an ind x when it's all said and done.

But the company points to the small parts that do over perform, and downplays the bad parts.

Turn 1 million into 5 million, and it's easy to forget there was another 10 million that's worth 6 million now.

Sure you up a million, but you're focused on that 5x gain and not the 4 million loss. So before commissions it's a draw.

In real life there's interest, inflation, and lots of other stuff that muddies the waters.

It's like their version of horse racing, they bet on a bunch and hope one hits it big and pays off the losses on the others. It's the same as gambling and just as addictive.

So if these employees were answering their phone when a big client calls and letting stuff sit, their performance was probably fine.

Because it's not a real job.
I've been the one identifying the people who use jigglers. Usually it was a manager coming to us to look for a reason to fire a poor employee or a contractor trying to bill a suspiciously large number of hours for the work produced. If it was just poor performance, HR would make us do a PIP and waste 3 months on them. Violating security procedures and falsifying time sheets was an immediate termination. And for the contractors, you need evidence in order to refuse payment.

Btw, if you want to get away with it, don't use a software or USB one. Get one that interfaces with a regular mouse. Modern cybersecurity software logs every process executed and device connected.
- But the USB one is going to be identified as a mouse (input device), you can even change the hardware id to be the same as the work mouse no?
"because they might finish their work in 2 hours, which means they're stealing 6 hours of pay from us!" - Idiots who spent dollars obsessing over pennies.
- I mean, if you can do it in 2 hours I think it's pretty fair to want you to do something else, but if it's whole day thing and you finish an hour early you're probably not going to be effective in that last hour anyway.
  
  That's not the best time to start something completely new
One thing to keep in mind: with "knowledge work", the work is never done - there's always more to do.

So for middle management it's really hard to measure productivity, so we get this nonsense.

This is also why Agile project management is so popular - it provides a daily metric of what's going on, what people are doing. It forces a granularity of communication (which for those of us with lots to do, gets pretty fucking annoying).
Exactly. I kind of don’t give a shit about how my employees manage their time. If they get the thing done when we both agreed it should reasonably be done by, and they’re reasonably available to support their coworkers during business hours, then they can play video games for half the day for all I care.

You measure the results, not the clicks.
That means you have to do actual management. Talk to people. Keep on top of workloads. Rebalance things. Build relationships. They don't have time for that - they have their own tasks to do. So they rely on the green checkmark to mean that lil Davey is being a good busy bee.
I don't know why things got to be this way.
But then you can't fire them and not have to call it a re org.

A Wells Fargo spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company "holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior."

I mean the jokes write themselves

The only two things higher than that are the fees they extract from overdraft and the money they pay their legal team.
The shareholders will be furious.

Poor Wells Fargo. Maybe they should sign a bunch of customers up to loans they didn't ask for about it to feel better.

After that fiasco I can't believe anyone still uses Wells Fargo.
- After that crime spree I can't believe Wells Fargo is still allowed to exist.
- I've never used Wells Fargo, but I never heard about this fiasco you guys are talking about.
- You don't have a choice where your loan ends up plus there are all the corporate contracts that aren't going to change. They were stealing money from the elderly not businesses.
  
  I have a company I deal with at work where the owner of that one cussed out and hung up the phone on the CEO of where I work. We still do business with them because it's way too much money to walk away from.
- Funnily enough an accounting teacher I had used Wells Fargo
There's a hallmark/lifetime movie about this. The bank isn't WF but we all know who it is.

After his corporate rah-rah and disbelief his bank full of good ethical people would do such a thing, at the behest of the main character he finds out from some marketing chuds it is in fact true. Believing in the company to do the right thing he goes against the main character's wishes and tells an exec who expectedly closes the accts of the vocal customers and sweeps it all under the rug - deleting all record.

The love interest finds out his company doesn't actually care about their customers when he asks if they are going to do a full company investigation and the exec laughs and instead offers up a potential promotion instead.

I knew the whole plotline was bullshit when he quit to become a whistleblower. As he gave his first interview on the main character's tv station, he gave his full name as he did a live interview and didn't get murdered by the bank immediately.

Thanks to Boeing we all learned that whistleblower is a far more dangerous profession than police officer and the chance of dying is thousands of percent higher. You really have to suspend disbelief at the movie plot.
- I'm still trying to wrap my head around suffering watching a Lifetime movie in purpose tbh.. but yeah, their plots are unintentionally farcical every time.
  
  e: suffering=someone but it still works so I'll leave it
- I’m trying to suspend my disbelief at you watching a hallmark movie and remembering it well enough to give a synopsis.
Turns out the employees didn't actually do that. It was the mouse jigglers and clickers conspiring together.

Friendly reminder that Wells Fargo is a criminal enterprise masquerading as a bank.

That applies to all investment banks no? Or is Wells Fargo a special kind criminal?
- No you're right. It's like Mitch Hedberg used to say about drinking though.. Still does, but he used to too.
  
  They are, but Wells Fargo too.
- Wells Fargo specifically committed widespread, systemic fraud and identity theft.
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_cross-selling_scandal?wprov=sfla1
They're the same picture.

A Wells Fargo spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company "holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior."

Says an unethical piece of shit corporation that secretly opened millions of unauthorized accounts of their customers to collect bogus fees, appease their shareholders and financial status.

Were the executives fired? No. Were they jailed for financial fraud? No.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wells-fargo-agrees-pay-3-billion-resolve-criminal-and-civil-investigations-sales-practices

"Highest standards" my ass. My job provides service to Wells Fargo; their fraud claims department is full of the rudest, most condescending people I've had the displeasure to work with.
Says an unethical piece of shit corporation that secretly opened millions of unauthorized accounts of their customers to collect bogus fees, appease their shareholders and financial status.

It's unethical for the workers to pretend to open those accounts by using software to trick their administrators into looking busy.
But they did use their mouse for valid company business, so it is all OK.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but your last sentence isn't correct.

Last year, the former head of the bank’s retail operation was sentenced to three years of probation, while the bank’s former CEO was banned from the industry.
- I think technically op may be correct, as being banned from an industry is different from the business firing them. And probation isn't jail time
- Sorry to come with "um, ackshuslly" but they didn't ask if they were convicted of a crime. The question was "were they jailed? And according to your post, they were not.
My ex-MIL worked for Wells Fargo and opened an account for me to help meet her quota. Then I started getting overdraft fees because there was no money in the account to pay the monthly fees for the account I didn’t want or use. I had her close it. So yeah the whole company was kinda duplicitous.
If they're yet another stereotypical thieving baron then doesn't that make it actually ethical to do fucking any kind of damage or do you gotta be heath ledger to actually be the good guy there?

If they're firing people for this then the way they judge employee productivity is incorrect. What I want to know is what did these employees even do day to day? Sounds like a whole bunch of bullshit job positions to me. Wells Fargo is a shit leech corporation, drain on society, middle-man hell.

It works like this. You work your ass off. Then when you've earned money, give it to them. Still with me? If you give them your money, they'll figure out a way to give your money to someone else to make money off of them. You'll get a small meaningless cut from the deal. They earn that money and pay shit to their employees who are wiggling mice around.
Know what the people I play world of warcraft with do, I'd say they're busy playing world of warcraft
- i work with a guy who used to play that at work until one day the big boss caught him

Ah yes. Work that tracks you, not by your output, but by whether your mouse jiggles a statistically correct amount. Nice.

70 year old management member who came up with the idea of using this metric in the first place:

"The system shows you haven't touched your mouse for half an hour."

"Yes, I worked out a solution on paper, like back in the old days."

[confused noises]
The jigglers keep you online status from changing to "away."

Some jobs require you to be at your desk, and using mouse jigglers to fake being at work is the kind of thing that keeps more companies from allowing WFH.
- Sure. Yes. I'm aware.
  
  The point is, if an employee isn't productive, the company should notice, because they should be running some kind of oversight over the work either being done or not being done.
  
  If the work is being done, even if the employee isn't always 100% focused, the company shouldn't care.
  
  If the work is not being done, the company should care, regardless of how active the mouse moves.
  
  using mouse jigglers to fake being at work is the kind of thing that keeps more companies from allowing WFH.
  
  No, companies don't allow WFH because they don't trust employees or can't verify, employees doing their work from home. Most of the time, because the company people don't understand that work and couldn't judge if it's being done correctly without adults in the room.
  
  tldr: people should be hired and fired based on their performance. Crazy talk, I know.
- If the job requires you to be at your desk then presumably that means you have work to complete. Judge people for what they get done, not how often they mindlessly move a mouse and this wouldn't be a problem!
- Even if you are at your desk and say waiting for a ticket to come in or a call, you'll be set to away so it doesn't make sense to moitor by that.
  
  Worked in IT 9 years and never come across a company that monitors this.

I use a mouse jiggler while I'm working because I often spend quite a bit of time just thinking through data structures and code composition and Teams is absolutely sure that I'm away from my desk if it's more than 5 minutes.

Same here. Also I sometimes think about these kinds of things when I'm off the clock too. I don't want to but you can't exactly tell your brain to stop thinking about work stuff at 5pm. Sometimes I'm just watching TV or whatever and a thought about how to solve a work problem pops into my head.

To me it says more about how bad the management is at a company that has to resort to try to detecting mouse jigglers. Do they know so little about what the employees do that they don't simply notice that work isn't getting done if an employee isn't actually working?
- Hilariously enough there's tons of empirical data that shows people are far more productive in socializing environments where micromanaging doesn't happen, and arbitrary rules aren't put in place. Give people an actual sense of community, they actually engage in work they have to get done.
If you join a private meeting with yourself it will show you busy
- That explains my turbulent pubescence.
- Just a heads-up, there are activity reports that can be run that will readily show this.
Start a meeting. Then mark yourself as available.
- Only downside with teams is that you can't accept direct teams calls while in a meeting and they can see you are in a meeting. You always get the odd person who dials before asking via chat if you are available so you don't get the chance to close your meeting first.
- Code up an F24 presser in Excels VBA macro editor, and run that between your work hours.
- That is a good suggestion. Interesting. I'll have to try it. Although if you're in a meeting doesn't that mark you as busy?

Is the job to be interacting with a computer for the entire duration of your shift? Fuck this incentive structure that requires people to fake touching their computer parts to show that work is being done.

in my previous job i lost the privilege to work from home because my boss told me i am "tickling my girlfriend and not working". when in reality my job was so easy i could do all of it in about 2 hours, so i left a magnet holding down space bar to keep the pc from sleeping. of course they had taken screenshots and could tell that pretty much nothing was being done for the whole day. so then i had to drive 40km every day to do the exact same thing in the office.
- They let you tickle your girlfriend at the office? That's pretty progressive!

When I worked there, they wouldn't assign me tasks and then blamed me when nothing got done.

Did you try just staring at the screen and jiggling the mouse? This appears to be their only way of measuring productivity.
- Ya really gotta click occasionally and maybe type a few things.
Getting blamed for their incompetence was the task.
- Please
Same actually
The way you phrased this could go either way: were you never taking on more work, no matter how obviously it needed to get done, just because you weren't explicitly told to do that job? Because that would be a fair criticism in my estimation.
- the reality is that incompetent managers love to blame their employees for not doing shit they never told them to do.
- If you want me to make executive decisions then pay me like an executive.
- were you never taking on more work, no matter how obviously it needed to get done
  
  Bad management creates excess redundant and disorganized labor for the base worker.
  
  If your boss is shitting this stuff out uncontrollably, perhaps that's their problem more than yours.
  
  Either way, sacking all those people won't get the work done any faster.
- I'm not sure how fair it is. How would you know what work there is if there aren't any tickets being assigned for example?

maybe stop tracking people's minute movements you fucking absolute creeps

Monitoring employees in this way is just the shittiest shit of all the shit. Surely they can assess output in a different way?

Right. Do they have a manager assigning them work? And then after a couple of weeks of mouse-juggling, no assignments done.

It sounds like poor management, too, aside from the mouse-jiggling.
- Management is probably also mouse jiggling…

We cant use the same performance metrics used in other industries on IT. I could be struggling with a coding problem for hours but it doesn't mean im not working.

The amount of times I've logged off work with a coding problem only to stew on it for 4 hrs including when I'm laying in bed. I'm not billing work for any minute of that nor would I be able to if I tried. Game is fucking rigged in favour of the employer.
- Similar problem for me as a lawyer. I can have a case that keeps me up at night stewing and trying to think of a solution, but I feel it would be ethically irresponsible to bill them for 5 hours when I’m not “technically” working on their case.
- I realize I'm very privileged. If I'm working on an issue for a whole day or a half day, everything I do during that day is part of the solution and will be billed to the customer (and I'll be paid for by my employer too). If that includes taking a nap, so be it. Results are what matter, as it should be. If someone ever starts saying I'm taking too long to do something I may consider changing my ways.
- Just because I’m not sitting at a keyboard doesn’t mean my brain isn’t working on the problem. I’ve had epiphanies taking a shit before. I’m a systems architect so not really a code monkey but I solved a DNS/networking issue the other day doing dishes. No idea why it hit me then but then again I have ADHD and my brain is fucking weird.
If you worked for me (or any other of about 20 PO's at my company), you'd be comfortable telling me that you were struggling. You'd explain the challenge and your estimate to completion, and I'd either reshuffle our priority list so that you could park the task and pick another one, or find someone for a pair programming session with you. That's the common practice, and nobody should care whether you're yellow on Teams or use a mouse jiggler, as long as you communicate your work and challenges.
- or find someone for a pair programming session with you.
  
  Then you would make it take longer.

I bet they forgot to rig the webcams, microphones, seat weight sensors, and infrared desk presence trackers.

And the Blutooth butt plugs
- And here I am, wearing those just for fun
- This is Wells Fargo, not a chess tournament
MOVEMENT NOT DETECTED!! COMMENCING FIRING IN 5...4...

Employee frantically running out of the bathroom towards his PC, Toilet paper dragging from his pants

I WAS TAKING A SHIT!!!

"More than a dozen employees" for Wells Fargo is basically no one.

why though? Were they not getting enough done? And if its only like a dozen, does it justify the productiviry loss of hiring keyboard police?

They don't care about productivity. They care about the appearance of control, and the revelation of subversive activity is a gross embarassment to the ego that thrives on that control.

It's a bully having a tantrum because his victims don't fear him enough.
Were they not getting enough done?

If not then fire them for that. Seems like a better metric that's more related to how well they do their job than "how much has your mouse moved?"
- How much the mouse moved is explicitly, pointedly NOT the metric they were fired for.
  
  The reason is in the headline.
- Not defending them. But ill take their position for a second. I give x amount of work and expect you to finish it. And you do. But if that work takes you 2 hours and the rest of the day you do nothing it just means I can give you more work because 2 hours is just abysmal. So I wanna know about it.
Exactly what I keep saying. Do they get the job done? Yes or No? Very simple question in my opinion.
- Some people are paid on the basis of time, not accomplishment.
To entrench back to office sentiment
- Joke's on them, I can slack off just as hard in an office as I can at home

Management: we need to find ways to automate work using AI

The ai would also use mouse jigglers after a few Werks, its the work evvironment

So glad I work a job where if I show 'Away' on Teams no one says anything, because my work is getting done. Sounds like bad management imo.

I’ve noticed that I’m in away mode way more in office than when working from home. Nobody has ever said anything to me, but I guess I get more self conscious about it when I’m at home.

But then I’ve realized that ever since I started running Linux and using the browser versions of the M365 apps, I’m in Away mode a lot and I should just ignore it.

Gee, I would think a company like Wells Fargo would want to promote these innovators to management positions.

Wells Fargo must think this is some sort of flex.

I think this is propaganda so other companies can say, "wells Fargo had an issue with this so we are going to start cracking down too". Then they can lay off a bunch of people and not have to give severance.
- They fired 12 employees of a workforce numbering over 216,000. Looks like they fired 1000x more employees (literally...12000) last year just because "that's business." What a nothingburger.

Chat-gpt can you please follow my mouse around and then just keep doing that movement for a while until I move the mouse myself? Put my video from yesterday's windows 11 recall at this time on so that any admin logging in right now can think that I'm actually working.

As a reminder, at work, an admin can login to your PC and watch a stupid mouse jiggler do its jiggling to catch you. Be smarter, work harder!

All you really need is a better mouse mover. Cradle for the mouse with a wheel under it with a pattern designed to make the mouse move around randomly.
- Hardware solution is the way. Then they need much bigger software to detect it.
Oh lord. Glad i don't live in a country where that kind of intrusion and surveillance is legal.
- I think it hasn't been tried in court enough. Like it's illegal to watch you poop by installing a camera in the restroom and making sure you are actually pooping and not just sitting and pretending to poop.
  
  But would the court find it illegal to have the laptop camera be used to secretly look at you say every 3 minutes to make sure you're focused on work and not slacking off?

More than 12!!!! 14? Come on. It's precious few people in a company that big.

I hate cheaters

Wells Fargo

I'll allow it

What’s the best Jiggle Billy to use at work?

Sooooo we jigglin?
- Oh I ain't dead, I'm just real depressed
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

Jiggle Billy

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

How did they find out?

Installed applications can tell IT what software is installed on individual computers. IT usually doesn't care unless something could harm the computer or network... or until some higher up with nothing better to do tells them to do a search for someone like this.

I'm in IT and even I use a mouse jiggle app just so Teams doesn't show I'm away constantly. Even when I am working on another program, Teams can show the away status which annoys me.

Not everybody who uses it does it to goof off. Micro-managing is so stupid. There are other ways of knowing your employee is doing work.
- Teams will show you as away even if you are watching a security training video or reading a long email..or waiting for a bunch of dataflows to refresh. It's a really bad way of calculating if someone is away.
- I just set my teams to busy all the time. If someone wants to talk to me they can.
- I'm also in IT and also using a jiggler.. lol. My jiggler shows up as a mouse in device manager. So that's why I ask the question. I switch my thunderbolt connection to another machine, so OS will just see a mouse disconnect/reconnect basically...
  
  Unless they're monitoring my screen and seeing the mouse go one pixel up then down, I don't know how they accomplished it. Maybe by monitoring at an OS level which applications are in focus and for how long? How many key presses/mouse clicks in a certain time period?

I do this too. It's called 'software development '.

There is a device on Aliexpress that mimics the mouse usage

That's what a mouse Jiggler is.
- < mind blown >

https://youtu.be/KUXb7do9C-w

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/KUXb7do9C-w

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Only reason they got got is the company used windows recall to spy on them

It's ok to think recall is invasive and bad for privacy, but it isn't even released yet. If you're gonna hate something and drag it through the mud, do it for real and valid reasons.