U.S. Bank illegally used customer data to create sham accounts to inflate sales numbers for the last decade. Now they've been fined $37.5 million plus interest on unlawfully collected fees.

After more than a decade of illegally accessing customer credit reports to open fraudulent lines of credit and create sham accounts, the U.S. Bank is being fined $37 million.

According to the Consumer Financial Protections Bureau, the fifth largest commercial bank in the United States pressured employees to create fraudulent checking and savings accounts, credit cards, and lines of credit without customers' permission.

"For over a decade, U.S. Bank knew its employees were taking advantage of its customers by misappropriating consumer data to create fictitious accounts," the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said. We need to do more to hold companies accountable when they abuse and misuse our data.

The investigation found that the U.S. Bank had incentive-compensation programs that rewarded employees for opening new accounts and for selling bank products.

The U.S. Bank will have to pay impacted consumers' interest and refunds illegally collected fees related to fraudulent accounts.

A U.S. Bank spokesman told Insider that the settlement was related to a small percentage of accounts dating back to 2010. Since 2016 the bank has made process and oversight improvements to address the concerns.

The U.S. Bank has been investigating for over five years, according to a bank spokesman. This matter is behind us.

Major banks have been found to have created accounts for customers without their permission before. Two million fake accounts were created by employees at Wells Fargo in order to increase their cross-sell ratio.