Doug Stanglin

USA TODAY

Three employees of Prudential Financial Inc. have charged in a lawsuit that they were threatened with termination for trying to report alleged fraudulent sales of life insurance policies through Wells Fargo & Co. to low-income customers with Hispanic surnames, according to media reports.

The three claimed in the suit filed in New Jersey state court that many of the customers did not know what they had purchased and that there were “a large number of similarities” between the way Wells Fargo employees opened bogus bank accounts without customers’ knowledge and the way Prudential’s “MyTerm” policies were sold by the bank, The New York Times reports.

The policies were allegedly targeted at people who could not otherwise obtain life insurance and could only be bought at self-service kiosks at Wells Fargo branches or online using Wells Fargo credit cards or bank accounts, according to the complaint.

In some cases, policies were opened and closed within a month or two and then reopened, the suit charges. Sometimes monthly fees were withdrawn from the accounts, according to evidence in the lawsuit, Reuters reports.

“When we started peeling back the onion, everywhere we looked, it stunk,” said Darron Smith, one of the plaintiffs, the Times reports.

When investigators reviewed tapes of calls to Prudential’s customer service line, they found complaints from Wells Fargo customers about policies they did not remember buying, The Times reports. Many of the customers did not speak English and needed a Spanish interpreter, the plaintiffs said in the lawsuit, according to the newspaper.

The three would-be whistleblowers worked for the company's corporate investigations division and claimed in the lawsuit that executives ignored their reports of the alleged abuses for fear of alienating Wells Fargo as a business partner. They also claimed they were escorted from the building and have a threat of "imminent termination" hanging over their heads, Bloomberg reports.

Wells Fargo has acknowledged that its bankers may have created millions of fraudulent accounts. It has fired more than 5,000 employees over five years, refunded customers and agreed to pay fines totaling $185 million. Chief Executive Officer John Stumpf resigned in wake of the scandal and the company still faces numerous lawsuits by former employees, customers and investors.

Prudential spokesman Scot Hoffman said the company had been monitoring its business with Well Fargo since last year and expanded its review of how its insurance product was sold after the San Francisco-based bank was fined in September, according to Reuters. "We anticipate reviewing this matter with our regulators in due course,” Hoffman said in a statement.

Hoffman, in an emailed statement to Bloomberg, denied the plaintiffs' claims of wrongful termination.

"These former employees were terminated for appropriate and legitimate reasons that were entirely unrelated to Prudential’s business with Wells Fargo and Prudential’s decision to examine sales of the MyTerm product,” he said.