For years, Fifth Third Bank, a large regional bank based in Ohio, opened unauthorized accounts in customers’ names as part of an aggressive sales strategy that foisted credit cards, online banking services and other products on people without their knowledge, according to a lawsuit filed on Monday by one of the bank’s federal regulators.

The bank “set goals that thousands of its employees could not achieve” and penalized those who fell short, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said in a complaint in federal court in Chicago. The misconduct stretched back to at least 2008, and the bank failed to sufficiently respond to internal warning signs, the consumer bureau said.

The charges against the bank echoed those that have bedeviled Wells Fargo, which has been engulfed in turmoil since its admission in 2016 that it created what may have been millions of sham accounts to increase its sales.

Fifth Third said it would fight the consumer bureau’s lawsuit, which it called “unnecessary and unwarranted.” It did, however, acknowledge that its own reviews had found 1,100 accounts that were opened without authorization.