Having your money moved from the account where you expect it to be into another account that is “in your name” but of which you have no knowledge would do you great harm.
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That would be a theft of funds, which I don’t see referenced. As I understand, the money was moved into those accounts and then moved back to create the illusion that the accounts were in use. Was the money actually retained?
Credit scores have a variety of inputs, including borrowed funds due ( competing monthly obligations), proportion of open credit used, making regular payments on time, and average duration credit accounts have been open. Opening new accounts can spew the average towards new, until they slew the average towards longevity. Having more unused credit raises the score, apparently because it means you’ve been approved by others.
If you are someone who has little credit history, I suppose it could during a narrow window depress your score a few points, which could enter into the loan decisions at the margins, but the claims seem all out of proportion to that.
To a point. But when we were applying for our mortgage they were going to knock down our rating because we had too much open credit. They were zero balance accounts but by their logic if we had it available we might use it. We closed all but two and shaved a half a point off our locked in interest rate.
As I understand, the money was moved into those accounts and then moved back to create the illusion that the accounts were in use.
Moving money from account to account does not happen at once. There is a delay. If you have something hit during that delay you get a NSF. This hurts your rating, it hurts your relationship with the vendor and it can be a criminal matter if they want to get nasty about it.
And for some people those accounts they opened were used by someone and then not cleared. That leaves a very nasty ding on your record and is a pain to clean up. If WF employees had not opened the bogus account in the first place it would not have been sitting there fat dumb and happy to be stolen.