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American banking giant Wells Fargo fired several employees who pretended to be active on their keyboards while working.
It is still unclear how the hoax was discovered or whether it was specifically related to employees working from home.
The US bank reported that workers were fired or resigned “after reviewing allegations involving the keyboard activity simulation, creating the impression of active work.”
New rules recently came into effect in the US requiring bank agents who work from home to be inspected every three years.
“Wells Fargo “It holds its employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior,” said a bank spokeswoman.
In 2022, Wells Fargo said it had adopted a flexible hybrid work model in which staff could work from home part-time.
Some large companies have long used increasingly sophisticated tools to monitor employees since remote work became widespread during the Covid pandemic.
Such tools can track keystrokes and eye movements, take screenshots, and record which websites are visited.
But technology has also evolved to evade surveillance, including “mouse jigglers” (mouse movers), which aim to make computers appear to be in use.
According to Amazon, where you can buy one at a time less than US$10thousands of units have been sold in the last month.
Chain Bloomberg reported the layoffs based on a filing by Wells Fargo with the U.S. Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, noting that more than a dozen people had been affected.
The BBC confirmed six cases of dismissaland a case in which a person voluntarily resigned after facing accusations of simulating work.
Several of them had worked for Wells Fargo for less than five years.
Many companies, especially in the financial industry, are pushing their staff to return to the office.
He remote work remains popular since the pandemic, but numbers have been declining.
In the United States, just under 27% of paid days last month were work-from-home days, compared to more than 60% at the height of the pandemic in 2020, according to research by professors at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo of Mexico (ITAM), the Stanford Business School and the University of Chicago.
According to researchers, as of this spring, about 13% of full-time employees in the US were fully remote and another 26% had a hybrid arrangement.
*By Natalie Sherman
BBC World
