INFESTMENT BANK

More Wells Fargo shams crawl into the light

There’s something missing from the Wells Fargo report on its fake accounts: nearly half of it.

The nation’s third-largest bank opened 3.5 million fake accounts from 2009 to September 2016 — about 70 percent more than the 2.1 million Wells had previously estimated, according to a summary of an auditor’s Thursday report.

But missing from the explosive report by PricewaterhouseCoopers is a sevenyear period from 2002 to 2009, during which Wells admitted in April it also had opened fake accounts.

Asked about the discrepancy, a Wells Fargo rep told The Post on Thursday that the seven-year period — which in April enlarged by $32 million a civil class-action settlement that’s currently pending — was omitted from the Thursday report because it was “difficult to do the data analysis.”

By omitting that time period, the bank is potentially cutting off restitution for customers and preventing the true size of the fake-accounts scandal from being known.

“They should get the data,” Dick Bove, analyst at the Vertical Group, told The Post. “I think they’re not lying when they say it’s not going to be a walk in the park.”

In March, Wells had reached a $110 million settlement with customers who claimed to have been ripped off by fees from phony accounts dating back to 2009. The next month, the bank beefed up the settlement to $142 million as it extended the period of time back to 2002.

“The expansion of this agreement is another important step to make things right for our customers,” Tim Sloan, the bank’s chief executive, said at the time.

The new fake-accounts report, however, only goes back to Jan. 1, 2009.

That’s because data before then includes account information from a bank Wells acquired on that date — Wachovia, which used different systems, according to bank spokesman Mark Folk.

“When you go back in time, it becomes more difficult to do the data analysis,” Folk told The Post.

“If you have mergers, you have systems that are coming together through mergers,” he said.

What’s making it difficult is “changes in the data systems over time,” Folk said, declining to elaborate further.

When asked if the bank was going to issue a separate report on the period before 2009, Folk was unequivocal: “No.”

Folk added that customers who believe they have been hurt by the bank should contact Wells. “We want to hear from them,” he said.

The San Francisco-based financial giant, which says the accounts were “potentially unauthorized” because they failed to fit within a normal pattern of the way customers opened savings and credit-card accounts, maintained that it has refunded customers $3.5 million for the newly discovered fake accounts.

“We apologize to everyone who was harmed,” Sloan said in a statement Thursday.

“What you find is there’s never just one cockroach in the kitchen when you start looking around,” Warren Buffett, Wells Fargo’s largest shareholder, said during a CNBC interview on Wednesday, the day before the report was released.

There’s never just one cockroach in the kitchen. — Buffett, on Wells Fargo’s serial woes