Carrie Tolstedt, the former head of retail banking at Wells Fargo, has avoided prison time over her role in the bank’s fake accounts scandal.

The disgraced executive pleaded guilty in March to her role in obstructing a government probe into misconduct at Wells Fargo’s retail and small business lending unit which she led for almost a decade.

On Friday, US District Judge Josephine Staton in Los Angeles sentenced Tolstedt to three years of probation including six months of home confinement, along with a $100,000 fine and an order to serve 120 hours of community service.

To date, Tolstedt is the only former Wells Fargo executive to face charges over the scandal in which employees opened millions of accounts and sold products that customers did not want in an effort to meet unrealistic sales goals.

Prosecutors had sought a one-year prison sentence, but the judge decided that this would make her appear solely responsible for a wider cultural issue at the bank which cultivated an aggressive attitude to sales.

In her plea, Tolstedt said that she accepted “full responsibility” for her actions and requested the sentence she was eventually handed. She has also accepted an industry ban, agreed to pay $20 million in civil fines to resolve charges by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Securities and Exchange Commission, and has given tens of millions od dollars of her pay back to her former employer.

In 2020, Wells Fargo paid $3 billion to settle federal criminal and civil investigations into its sales practices and admitted that it pressured employees to ‘cross-sell’ for a period of 15 years.

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