Wells Fargo has made a wave of layoffs in recent weeks after claims some of its employees were faking keyboard activities to fool the company into thinking they were at work.
America's third-largest bank announced the decisions in broker filings with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra).
The company did not respond to questions about how the alleged issue was discovered and whether it was related to remote work.
This month, new rules came into effect in the US that mean offices where real estate agents work from home must be inspected every three years.
“Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior,” spokeswoman Laurie Kight said in a statement.
Some large companies are using increasingly sophisticated tools to monitor employees since remote working expanded during the Covid pandemic.
Such services can track keystrokes and eye movements, take screenshots and log which websites are visited.
But technology has also evolved to evade surveillance, including so-called “mouse jigglers,” designed to give the impression that computers are actively being used and are widely available.
According to Amazon, where they can be found for less than $10, thousands have been sold in the past month.
In the filings, Wells Fargo said employees resigned or were fired “after investigating allegations regarding the simulation of keyboard activity that gave the appearance of active work.”
Bloomberg, which first reported the layoffs, said more than a dozen people had been affected.
The BBC has confirmed six cases of staff being dismissed following investigations, and one case of someone voluntarily resigning after being confronted with the claims.
Many of them had worked for the company for less than five years.
It comes as many companies, especially in the financial sector, are pushing their staff to return to the office.
Remote work remains popular since the pandemic, but numbers have dropped.
In the US, just under 27% of paid days last month were work-from-home days, compared to more than 60% at the peak in 2020, according to research by professors from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) Business School, Stanford and University of Chicago.
As of this spring, about 13% of full-time employees in the U.S. were working fully remotely, and another 26% were on a hybrid arrangement, according to the researchers.
In 2022, Wells Fargo said it had adopted a hybrid, flexible model for most of its employees.
