Wells Fargo is the fourth-largest bank in the country, and it earned $22.4 billion last year — more than Walmart and Amazon combined. It takes some doing to make Wells Fargo look like a sympathetic victim, but the legal community in Pope County has managed it.
As explained in Arkansas Fax Avengers Target Wells Fargo for $22M, Wells Fargo at one point held money in an account for a Colorado company called WestFax, which provided broadcast fax service to a California company called Western Financial. Western Financial, through WestFax, sent a marketing fax to a company in Russellville called M.S. Wholesale and 42,270 other numbers.
The fax included a phone number for people to call “to be permanently removed from the list,” but it didn’t use the exact opt-out language required by the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act. So M.S. Wholesale, through the hometown Streett Law Firm and a Tennessee firm, filed a class-action suit in Pope County Circuit Court. And eventually got a $21.1 million judgment against WestFax (while letting Western Financial off the hook).
In pursuit of that judgment, the Streett firm sent Wells Fargo a demand to garnish WestFax’s account. But the account had already been closed, as a Wells Fargo employee notified Streett.
This is where Wells Fargo becomes sympathetic: The employee who responded to the writ of garnishment was not a lawyer, and attorney James Streett persuaded Pope County Circuit Judge Dennis Sutterfield that the response was the unauthorized practice of law. He persuaded Sutterfield to enter a judgment of $22.4 million — the WestFax judgment plus interest — against Wells Fargo for not properly responding to the garnishment.
This is Streett’s second eight-figure judgment in Pope County against a company that sent a fax to M.S. Wholesale. This looks like jackpot justice. It’s not a good look.
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