Update October 12: Wells Fargo has announced that CEO and Chairman John Stumpf will step down from both positions and the bank's President and Chief Operating Officer Timothy J. Sloan will replace him, effective immediately. Stumpf promised earlier this year that he would forfeit $41 million in unvested equity, which the Wall Street Journal says is one of the largest bonus clawbacks ever for the chief of a US bank. CNBC reports that Stumpf will not receive a severance from the bank.

Original Story: Wells Fargo employees were creating fake accounts in customers’ names without their authorization as early as 2005, according to a letter obtained by Vice News. The letter comes from a former branch manager at a Washington state-based Wells Fargo Branch and was written in January 2006. Wells Fargo recently paid fines totaling $185 million for the creation of 2 million unauthorized accounts since 2011. The bank has said that it will investigate additional unauthorized accounts opened in 2010 and 2009, but it has not acknowledged that such a practice occurred as early as 2005.

Former branch manager Dennis Hambek wrote the 2006 letter to Carrie Tolstedt, who was Wells Fargo’s head of regional banking at the time. In it, Hambek documents a few instances of alleged misconduct, including employees applying for loans far greater than what their customers requested, as well as opening accounts without the customers’ consent.

Tolstedt became Wells Fargo’s Head of Community Banking in 2007. Just weeks before the news of Wells Fargo employee misconduct broke, she retired at the age of 56, entitling her to a severance and a bonus at the end of the year. Last month, Tolstedt forfeited her severance as well as $19 million in bonuses after Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf was questioned by congressional committees on the company’s scandal.

Whether or not Tolstedt read or acted upon Hambek’s letter is unclear, but Vice News published what appears to be the receipt certifying the letter.

Hambek, who was transferred to the poorly-performing West Yakima after working in Ellensburg, wrote in the letter that he was instructed in April 2005 to “bring the branch 100 percent in core sales, profit, and cross-sell by June 30, 2005, which was impossible."

Meanwhile, Hambek claims, the Ellensburg branch was thriving due to management unscrupulously allowing unethical “gaming.” He wrote:

... comments have been made by Personal Bankers at the Ellensburg Branch that they are exceeding their goals due to the fact that when a customer applies for a $10,000 personal loan, the PB gets them a $50,000 [loan]. Smart Fit then advances the $50,000 and has the customer repay $40,000 immediately. ... There are instances of gaming in opening new accounts. One example, a customer applied for a mortgage loan at the Selah branch and was given a PMA checking, growth savings, and a debit card, opened by a PB located in Ellensburg. The customer stated he had never met with the PB or been to the Ellensburg Branch. He never signed any documents or, worse yet, never received any disclosures.

According to Vice, that latter customer was a man named Bill Moore. When Moore came to see Hambek in 2005 about unauthorized accounts opened in his name, Hambek looked into Moore’s case and found that his driver’s license number on the checking and savings accounts had been listed as “MOOREWF00000” and the date of issuance for the license was Jan. 1, 2000 (when DMVs around the country generally remain closed for the New Year). The secondary form of identification was listed as “Known to Banker,” even though Moore denied having ever spoken to a banker about opening additional accounts.

In an e-mail, a Wells Fargo representative said:

We cannot confirm who received and read the letter referenced in the [Vice] report, as we cannot find a record of it. When complaints and issues are reported to the ethics line or escalated to management, they are shared with the appropriate channel for review, investigation, and response... As always, if there are issues raised that occurred outside of the review period that goes back to 2009, we will look into them and make things right with customers. We have made fundamental changes to help ensure team members are not being pressured to sell products and customers are receiving the right solutions for their financial needs, including ending all product sales goals for the retail bank, effective October 1st.

Separately, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Wells Fargo executives had a closed conference call yesterday with 500 senior executives to talk about the state of the business. According to a recording obtained by the WSJ, “executives said the situation would get harder for the San Francisco-based bank before it gets better.”

Still, the executives were reportedly unconcerned by recent divestment from outraged local governments in California and Illinois. Chief Operating Officer Timothy Sloan reportedly told executives that governments declining to do business with Wells Fargo haven’t really amounted “to much in terms of dollars yet.”

Sloan also added that the bank would try to keep that information close to the chest: “We probably won’t broadcast that because it might incentivize people to do more, to make it tougher on Wells Fargo, but the story line is worse than the economics at this point.”