Wells Fargo’s Latest Discrimination Case Parallels Past Claims

For more than a decade, Shawn Davis has been a faithful Wells Fargo bank customer, unaware, he said, of the bank’s history of discrimination complaints and lending disparity claims or the drumbeat of scrutiny by banking regulators and news outlets.

So when the 55-year-old Floridian and onetime “Shark Tank” contestant walked into a branch outside Las Vegas this summer to deposit a government-issued check, he had no idea it would lead to the bank’s latest courtroom battle.

Despite providing numerous identification documents, Davis said, a bank employee and branch manager refused to accept his check and, without offering any evidence, accused him of attempted fraud.

The allegation didn’t just rattle Davis. It mirrored past claims about the employment, training and practices of the nation’s fourth-largest bank.

In an amended federal lawsuit filed this fall, Davis and his lawyer cited at least four similar instances in the past six years where Wells Fargo patrons, like him, alleged they had been mistreated or mistrusted because they were Black.

Other claims have asserted the bank’s pattern of discrimination isn’t random, but rather institutional. Again and again, Wells Fargo paid to resolve the claims, typically without acknowledging wrongdoing.

Last month, the bank agreed to pay $85 million to settle allegations that it concocted sham interviews to appear it was meeting its stated policy to proportionately consider women, nonwhite or otherwise disadvantaged candidates for high-paying jobs.

Separately, Wells Fargo said in October that it would pay $100 million to end a lawsuit brought by shareholders who alleged Black and Hispanic borrowers were unfairly and disproportionately denied mortgage assistance.

Those cases mirrored two prior settlements, totaling $210 million, that Wells Fargo has paid since 2010 to resolve claims of discriminatory hiring, advancement or lending practices.

In a 21-page filing Nov. 3, Wells Fargo denied Davis’s allegations, challenged details of his account and asked a Nevada judge to dismiss the case. Its lawyers, led by McGuireWoods LLP, also asserted that Davis failed to offer evidence that a White customer trying to deposit a check in an out-of-state branch would have been treated differently.

It’s often tough to discern if discriminatory behavior, when proven, is isolated to an employee or ingrained within the culture of the company, particularly with confidential settlements, said John Paul Rollert, a business ethics professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

But a string of similar claims can be telling, Rollert said. “The more illustrations of racial discrimination you have across any organization, the more it’s a problem of culture and not individuals,” he said.

Accused Without Evidence

Davis, who also appeared on “Rachael Ray” and the reality program “Man v. Food,” had parlayed his cooking and business skills into what grew to be a chain of eight restaurants, called Big Shake’s Hot Chicken & Fish, located in the South. He was in Las Vegas in July attending a family birthday party.

Just before his trip, Davis received a $20,400 US Treasury economic impact check, the kind issued to business owners affected by the pandemic. He intended to use it to fund his consulting business and presumed he could deposit it at a Wells Fargo branch during his trip, he said.

Davis had long had a personal account with the banking giant, as well as a separate joint account with his wife.

When he arrived, Davis contacted the branch in Henderson, Nev., to schedule a meeting to create a new business account for his consulting business so he could deposit the check.

Davis sat at a desk, handing a bank staffer an array of personal documents he brought to open the account, according to his lawsuit. He then handed over the check.

The employee looked at the check. Without asking any questions about its origin or what it represented, he allegedly told Davis that he could not deposit it because the check was fake.

The accusation “was made abruptly, without evidence, and in a manner that conveyed the assumption that plaintiff could not rightfully have received such a check due to plaintiff’s African-American race,” according to his lawsuit.

Davis showed the government-issued envelope in which the check was sent and asked to speak to the branch manager. The manager agreed with her employee and told Davis the serial numbers on the check were forged, according to his lawsuit.

The manager also allegedly told Davis she had contacted the IRS “through a special line” and confirmed that the check was fraudulent or forged. She told Davis he was committing fraud.

“I couldn’t believe what was happening to me. She was accusing me of a crime I did not do,” Davis recalled in an interview. “She got combative and kept getting louder. I wanted to call the cops, but I was afraid I would have been the one arrested. I left the bank embarrassed. I couldn’t believe what happened to me.”

He walked out of the bank, sat in his parked car and cried, he recalled.

Shawn Davis

Davis returned to his Tampa area home the following week and took the check to his neighborhood Wells Fargo branch. Not only was the check accepted, he said, but the manager checked the bank’s system and said he could find no record of Davis’s visit to the Henderson branch.

Days later, according to the lawsuit, he received an email from Wells Fargo’s “Complaints Management Office” claiming to have reviewed his complaint about his visit to the Nevada branch and closed it after finding no wrongdoing.

Davis insists he never filed any such complaint.

Beyond racial discrimination, Davis’s lawsuit accuses the Nevada employees of defamation, negligence in hiring and employee supervision and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

“If a celebrity chef can be subject to this kind of treatment, I can only imagine what an ordinary, middle-class person would have to deal with,” said his attorney, Milan Chatterjee.

Bloomberg Law called the Henderson branch seeking comment. A Wells Fargo spokesperson called back to say the staffers declined to comment.

Among the arguments in their response, Wells Fargo’s attorneys — citing Nevada law — contended the lawsuit was flawed because the Treasury check was made out to Davis’s consulting business, CRD Holdings, LLC.

“Accordingly, any alleged wrongdoing would have occurred to CRD Holdings, LLC., the payee on the Treasury check and the entity for which plaintiff intended to open a business account for, not the plaintiff individually,” they wrote.

A photo of the check that Davis attached to his lawsuit, however, shows that it names both CRD and “Shawn Davis Sole MBR” as legal recipients.

Wells Fargo asserted Davis’s consulting company was not yet officially recognized as a business, submitting Nevada and Florida documents showing it was registered on July 9, or days after Davis’s visit to the branch. Lawyers for the San Francisco-based bank did not explain why or how the Treasury Department recognized CRD as a legitimate business deserving of a check.

Their response also argued that Davis’s lawsuit fails to cite evidence that “similarly situated White people” did not face similar challenges in depositing a Treasury check, or that the employees he accuses lacked training or had a history of discrimination.

As to the claim that employees used a “special IRS hotline” to verify his deposit, Wells Fargo attorneys said its employees entered the check information into a Treasury department website designed to verify government-issued checks.

Davis’s attorney disagreed with Wells Fargo’s response and said he plans to file a motion to oppose the dismissal request.

Pledges to Change

As part of its settlement of a 2017 lawsuit over claims that Wells Fargo failed to train or advance Black employees in its advisers’ brokerage unit, the bank began working with Harvard sociology professor Frank Dobbin, a consultant on implementing diversity programs through evidence-based research.

Dobbin said he spent five years working with the bank in identifying diversity initiatives and focusing on how Wells Fargo could improve its relationship with its Black financial consultants. He advised Wells Fargo to create a structured mentoring program for employees aimed at identifying and retaining employees, Dobbin told Bloomberg Law.

He also suggested Wells Fargo broaden its hiring by targeting historically Black colleges and universities as well as schools with large Hispanic student populations. And he advised Wells Fargo to create a formal skill and management training program “to make sure everyone has access to the skills and management training that wants it,” he said.

“They seemed to take the message,” Dobbin said. “They realized they weren’t going to fix everything by adding more diversity training and that they should instead focus on recruitment, mentoring and increase the skill set of its people.”

It remains unclear if Wells Fargo implemented any of Dobbin’s suggestions. A spokeswoman declined to comment.

In 2022, a Bloomberg News investigation found that the bank had rejected half its Black applicants during the mortgage refinancing boom between 2018 and 2022, when interest rates were at their lowest levels in decades.

That report landed weeks after a federal lawsuit on behalf of mortgage applicants who said they had to pay inflated interest rates because they were Black or Hispanic. Wells Fargo denied the allegations; the litigation is ongoing.

“They have a pattern and practice that they have where either they marginalize discrimination issues, or they just don’t care,” civil rights lawyer Ben Crump, who ultimately joined that case, told Bloomberg Law this fall.

The bank’s confidential settlements mean such discrimination claims are often left unproven, at least in the public eye.

Attorney Lilia Bulgucheva negotiated one of those settlements in 2020 for a 65-year-old Black man who claimed Wells Fargo branch staffers in San Francisco refused to let him cash checks written to him by a bank account-holder. It was one of the cases Davis’s attorney cited in the lawsuit.

Bulgucheva said she couldn’t discuss the settlement, but she said she expects to see more such discrimination claims in the coming months, in part because of the retreat from diversity, equity and inclusion practices under the Trump administration.

“The climate right now is ripe for some workers to feel emboldened to maybe dismiss people based on their race or sex, while at the same time, those on the other end of that treatment feel stronger to fight back via the courts,” Bulgucheva said.

Beyond public relations challenges, often the biggest fallout for corporations at the center of such lawsuits becomes the loss of talented employees who decide to work elsewhere, said Rollert, the University of Chicago business professor.

On top of that comes the loss of potential and longtime customers—like Davis.

Back home in Florida, Davis said he plans to close his accounts and transfer his funds to a Black-owned bank near his home.

“In the beginning it wasn’t clear to me how wrong this was. But I have a son and grandson. There is no way I want them to experience this type of discrimination,” he said. “I’m doing this to show them, sometimes you have to fight back.”

The case is Davis v. Wells Fargo Bank N.A., D. Nev., No. 2:25-cv-01607, motion to dismiss 11/3/25