Wells Fargo agreed to pay $2.09 billion in penalties to resolve a nearly 10-year-old investigation into the bank’s loans that contributed to the financial crisis, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

The bank knew that the mortgages it sold off to other investors had “misstated income information” — essentially overstating the strength of the loans when, in fact, the homeowners were unlikely to afford their homes.

Wells Fargo was then one of the largest mortgage lenders in the US, and from 2005 to 2008, sold 73,529 mortgage-backed bonds — about half of which have defaulted.

“Abuses in the mortgage-backed securities industry led to a financial crisis that devastated millions of Americans,” Alex G. Tse, acting San Francisco US Attorney, said in a statement.

Wells Fargo “instituted a campaign in 2005 called ‘Courageous Underwriting,’ a philosophy that encouraged Wells Fargo’s underwriters to take more chances, and be more aggressive, in approving loans that were outside of Wells Fargo’s underwriting guidelines,” according to the DOJ’s consent order.

About 70 percent of the bank’s mortgages had an “unacceptable” divide between what the borrowers had to pay and what they could afford, according to the bank’s own research, the DOJ said. Almost half of those had no explanation for why, the DOJ said.

The DOJ fine is among the smaller fines for a bank’s role in the financial crisis. In 2014, Bank of America paid the largest fine, $16.7 billion.