I've been arguing the gov use that threat for a while now, nice to see I'm not the only one. I got the idea reading about the British and Dutch east India companies, as the charter was the sword of Damocles the gov had over the companies.
I said that at an earlier stage when far fewer fake accounts had been reported and it was considered too extreme a remedy. Oddly, many people who take a get-tough approach to law and order matters have a wholly different set of standards when it comes to punishing corporations.
Ever since the "collapse" of the over-leveraged and irresponsible firms relying on subprime mortgages and BS credit swaps to boost their stock prices, the government is scared to death to allow anything like that to happen again.
It would take far more than silly accounting fraud to do that, unfortunately.
If this were a crime being committed by an individual on the same scale, what could that person expect to receive for a sentence? I really don't know the answer to that and I'm curious, but I strongly suspect that fines wouldn't be in it and it would be more of a custodial sentence.
Indeed. The individual actors within WF responsible made out 7 figures ahead (Tolstedt) or 8 figures ahead (Stumpf). There are not adequate disincentives for either the corporation or those within it to discourage such behavior.
Courts should have the legal power to "dissolve" a company, and this should be mandatory for some crimes. Workers would scrutinize a company's history a lot more closely if it were possible for their job to be dissolved for someone else's illegal activity.
Or maybe that creates too much risk for the average person to accept.
It's sad really. It seems to me that the whole Wells Fargo scandal is ultimately a lesson about how this company abused their employees and set them impossible tasks like "each customer should have X credit cards and Y accounts."
But that's not what people seem to have taken from it. Instead, the whole incident has been presented as "just another big bank defrauding its customers." In reality though, the goal of the fraud was not to enrich anyone, it was just for these employees to keep their jobs.
It feels like this whole incident could have spurred a conversation about the toxicity of these kind of unrealistic sales goals that provide no benefit to the customer, but it didn't.
The goal was to enrich a smaller number of people higher up the chain than the employees who actually committed the fraud. Your argument also is a strong case for why leadership is almost certainly to blame, since they are the only ones who were enriched or helped at all.
If I hired thousands of people who under my supervision committed millions of crimes I would expect to be held accountable. Furthermore questions of fact such as Wells Fargo's claims are the kind of thing you expect to be settled in a court or least a pretrial hearing.
That's not far off from Uber's corporate PR. After all Uber is only taking requests from riders, connecting riders to drivers, and processing payment for the entire transaction...really Uber is just a tech company, it's the drivers illegally operating as unlicensed taxis/rides for hire.
Some Uber drivers literally have criminal records for driving for Uber, Uber even recruited and paid bonuses for drivers to unknowingly leave counties where they were operating legally to counties they were violating the law, think anyone from Uber corporate is going to jail anytime soon?
I find it interesting when organizations use the 'few bad apples'analogy for this kind of thing.
The full statement is 'A few bad apples spoil the barrel' - which comes from the concept that a rotting apple lets off ethylene gas which will cause the apples surrounding it to also turn.
This is probably a better analogy than intended for the companies that incorrectly use it since bad behavior spreads like a corrupting influence through an organization and fixing it would really require larger changes than just getting rid of a couple people.
There's also the delightful expression: "A fish rots from the head down."
I'm deeply skeptical of the claim that you can have a few thousand instances of "rot" without there being somewhere higher in the company it's being spread from. If 1% of the company is "rotting", then something in leadership is "rotting".
I was friends in college with several other students who worked as entry level Wells Fargo tellers. They were individually performing the account shenanigans described. To them, it was just a loophole to be exploited to pad their account opening numbers. Tellers were basically stack ranked on the number of new accounts they opened each month.
None of them work for Wells Fargo anymore, and most have moved onto tech management or recruiter roles in the area. I'm not close friends but we're still in the same social circles, and I haven't heard of repercussions impacting them.
I see that in medical too. You have plenty of SOPs but management tightens deadlines to the point that it's obvious that you have to take shortcuts to meet them. Management then can point then to the SOP but in reality they created the conditions for non-compliance.
So one of the things I did for my project was to scan headlines related to corporate ethics, so I could start listing overviews of a company's record in this area.
Needless to say, Wells Fargo has pretty much been filling its own page in ways that no other company has been able (with the exception of Uber): https://suitocracy.com/company/wells-fargo
Seeing it all laid out like that really makes me wonder how it still gets by with so few consequences.
>Seeing it all laid out like that really makes me wonder how it still gets by with so few consequences.
Too big to fail. Check out the book "Chickenshit Club" if you want to see how this has all evolved since Enron and Arthur Andersen. The Justice Department is frequently paralyzed by politics and fear of causing economic harm to the country. Plus, several changes in legal precedents have made it much more difficult to prosecute companies and their executives.
Or maybe start with
Michael Woodiwiss: "Gangster Capitalism: The United States and the Globalization of Organized Crime" for a depressing look at the bleak history of corporate criminal behaviour...
Out of curiosity, did her org structure / leadership / messaging change at all after Wachovia was acquired? I've heard through the grapevine that that really wasn't a good acquisition for Wells, being very different wrt corporate culture.
> one of the things I did for my project was to scan headlines
Can I ask where you scrape them from? (Google News?) Is it possible to scrape past headlines from somewhere too, or do you just have to keep up with it every day?
RSS feeds of various news websites give me a daily shortlist which I manually approve to prevent false positives and duplicate stories. Since that manual part essentially means I am using it as a feed reader, I assume that's not breaking any terms of service from those providers.
For past news the only one I have been able to use is The Guardian's API, which is free for non-profits such as my Suitocracy project. It's... not great, but it's something. A start.
Simply by erasing stop words from a headline and then scanning the remaining terms for likely hits. The media has quite a few terms it likes to repetitively use in headlines for certain topics. I currently have about 100 terms to check a headline against. Think words like "environment", "bribe", "scandal", "accuse", "working conditions", etc...
It's... not a sophisticated system. It misses some major stories, gives me a few false positives, and of course lots of duplicates from differing sources.
But compared to what I had before (basically, nothing) it's a million times better.
What really baffles me is that the likes of Warren Buffett support WFC despite uncovering such wrong doing. I mean, what WFC did is completely unethical. Buffett, who practically epitomizes ethics, should have taken some action financially. He acknowledges that what WFC did was wrong, and he also acknowledges that more wrong doing might be uncovered. He still believes that WFC is a good long term investment.
One possible reason could be that this malpractice stemmed from one or two individuals who are now fired. So there could be reason to believe that the bank as a whole is still fine.
Buffet talks a good talk, but I can't say he walks it much. I think he's great at PR and keeping a soft image to protect his massive portfolio. If you really dig down into his portfolio a lot of his investments create pollution, are ethically challenged, don't always pay their taxes "right", and so on. Which is fine, except he keeps talking out of both sides of his mouth, and I like to call that out for what it is.
I'm no longer a moral fan of his, sorry to say. I know he goes on record as saying he "pays less in tax than his secretary" (not an exact quote) but I think that's just a smart tactic to avoid public critique of his actions (and instead distract with nice words).
Yeah am feeling quite the same. Nevada Energy is another such suspect company in his portfolio. Oh well, I think it's time to take a bearish view on BRK. Their main cash cow - vehicle insurance is gonna get upended very soon, probably in the next 10 years.
Well, sarcasm aside, it's fairly common to dismiss a new technology that can grow exponentially, because as humans we are tuned to linear thinking. In 1985, McKinsey speculated that there would be 900,000 cellphone subscribers overall globally. Now we can just dismiss McKinsey as just consultants, but guess what, any one in their position would have probably speculated around the same number because that's what the models and the Math would show.
Quite similarly, almost everyone is speculating on SDCs based on existing dogma and numbers, not taking into account how rapidly deep neural nets are evolving. Just look at the Imagenet competition history. I mean today we have neural nets that are better than humans at image classification. I'm quite sure, if you had asked even the most eminent researchers to speculate in 2012, they wouldn't have predicted such an outcome.
It is also easy to take the position that I am taking, that SDCs will be a reality in the next 5 years, just based on hubris and some Elon Musk cool-aid. However my view is purely based on the growth that we are seeing in deep neural nets.
However my view is purely based on the growth that we are seeing in deep neural nets.
Ah, see, there's where our POVs differ. My tack is that we've been "almost there" on things like speech and hand writing recognition for twenty years or so, and I wouldn't say we're "there" enough that I'd want a comparably competent system driving my car down the road. Adding to that is that from what I'm reading we're not to the level of, say, Alexa yet for SDCs. OTOH, you make good points about the rates of progress in neural nets, so perhaps I'm wrong. Experience says that I'm just as wrong in one direction as the rest of the industry is wrong in the other, and reality will end up somewhere in the middle. So let's check back in ten years. :-)
But I wouldn't be shorting Berkshire Hathaway just yet regardless.
All these headlines are way overblown by the media. If you think this type of behavior is restricted to wells fargo (like the media is making it seem), you're wrong. They just got caught.
The total damages done to wells custormers are in the low millions, while wells fargo makes upwards of 20 billion a year. What I'm saying is it's a product of a bad incentive system--not criminal master planning by the managements to raise profits.
That's the beauty of a "bad incentive system" that is designed by management: plausible deniability.
This was the execution of evil master planning by management, which included indirect rather than direct instruction. They knew that what they rewarded would get done, no matter the law.
And yet here we are, discussing a thing that I seriously doubt happened by random chance. Was there an internal forum where the thousands of bad apples came up with this? Or were they reacting to obvious and enforced management preferences?
It's pretty obviously bank tellers had perverse incentives. But I'm not sure it's so very different than a company that pays the QA a bonus for every bug found, then wonders why the bug tracker is filled with crap.
I think it's very reasonably cynical to expect a bank to happily pay 50 million fines to make a billion in profit, but I don't think the numbers are working out in their favor here.
These accounts weren't created to make money for Wells Fargo, that's just a by-product of the mechanism used for this fraud.
The fake accounts were used to make money for managers and executives at Wells Fargo by convincing shareholders, regulators and the company itself that performance was better than in reality.
The victims of this type of fraud are not just the directly impacted consumers, whose damages are not just measured in unwanted fees but also in their damaged credit histories. The bank itself is also a victim -- which means unrelated customers who store their money, stock market investors, and the general public who may have some relationship with Wells Fargo through multiple degrees of separation. Just looking at the bank's misappropriated profits hardly tells the whole story of systemic and pervasive fraud.
No, they aren't fake accounts, they're real accounts, inflicted on customers against their will and without their knowledge, and they come with real damage.
I'm similarly fascinated by the use of the passive voice when they are describing Wells Fargo committing more crimes. Imagine if the crime was committed upon them instead: "Bank robber uncovers that he robbed bank for more money than originally admitted."
Yeah, that's not passive voice, which in this context would be something like "the money was robbed from the bank," but you might be interested in the "past exonerative tense":
That is an agreement with Wells Fargo's Canadian branch/subsidiary. Wells Fargo Canada appears to provide services solely to businesses (i.e. no retail banking) so I believe that this subsidiary has nothing to do with Wells Fargo retail branches behaving unethically.
This is the kind of comment that just blows my mind (in a good way) when I read it. How do you suddenly just discover facts like this? Do you research it or do you just happen to know it beforehand? If it were me I would have just assumed it's the same Wells Fargo; it wouldn't have occurred to me to check that it's the one in Canada.
> This Wells Fargo Addendum constitutes a legal agreement between you, Stripe, and Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. and Wells Fargo Merchant Services, L.L.C. (collectively, “Wells Fargo”).
At some point, the "disconnect" between shareholders (even and as, on a massive scale -- especially and specifically these "too big to fail" institutions) and their businesses needs to be breached. Businesses with chronic, systemic wrong-doing need to be put down. Wells Fargo is a prime, current candidate.
If this were a Democratic administration, or a rational Republican one, I'd say, it's time for the FDIC (too bad Sheila Bair's no longer its head) to come in, take over, and sell off Wells Fargo.
And that we have a Savings and Loan type investigation and prosecution, flipping the smaller fish until we get to the top and lock them up. (And strip them of their ill-gotten personal assets.)
At this point, shareholders should be well informed as to where their growth and profits are coming from. If they want to invest in such behavior, they should equally reap the results, in financial terms.
In other, if currently unrealistically ideal words, "No one is above the law."
At some point, you have to act to effectively put the brakes on such behavior. Otherwise, it takes over.
It also touches on my biggest issue with corporate personhood. Corporations cannot go to jail. This needs to get fixed really bad. To me the solution is getting rid of the corporate personhood shield and prosecuting the individuals who actually made the decisions and send them to the same prisons we send drug dealers. No club fed.
Right? All these other banks are like "let's create sophisicated financial instruments to siphon money out of the global economy" and Wells Fargo is just like "what if we just steal money from people?"
> If this were a Democratic administration, or a rational Republican one, I'd say, it's time for the FDIC (too bad Sheila Bair's no longer its head) to come in, take over, and sell off Wells Fargo.
#1) but you didn't when it was a democratic administration
#2) why does the party of the president determine what you would say?
The history of too big to fail is littered with discarded ethics and increasing moral hazard on both sides of the aisle (80s, 90s, 00s, and 10s).
I did say this. And I was increasingly disappointed in the Democrats' "weak tea" responses.
It's a good point about "administration", too. I used it as a poor and incorrect stand-in for "majority".
At this point in time, I see some sort of corrective action as more likely from the Democratic side or from those Republicans who do not equate "conservative" with an ideology of personal greed and self-interest. For one point, systemic criminal behavior that also abuses your customer base, does not tend to conserve the institution -- unless it is or is granted quasi-monopoly status where those affected have no means of redress -- nor perhaps meaningful, better alternatives (e.g. an oligarchy of corruption, such as existed in the mortgage and mortgage-backed-securities market leading up to the 2008 crash).
Anyway, yeah, I fear even more our chances in the face of "the majority's" drive to neuter and dismantle existing law and regulation. But I don't believe either side has had too much interest in substantially, not to mention fully, addressing these problems. Not since..... Well, I guess since Carter. And the now seemingly anomalous prosecution of the Savings and Loan scandal in the latter '80's.
Mine's a rather limited perspective. But the string of incidents -- story after story about institutions getting off with fines that pale in comparison to their profits (those at the expense of often massive externalized costs) -- seems pretty apparent.
And actual jail time, as a result of the Savings and Loan malfeasance, did seem to at least produce a "tap on the brakes", for a short time.
In this case, there is no defining line between the two major parties. They both rely heavily on bank lobbyists and come from their stock. There's going to be no changes.
Seems like forensic analysts did not do such a good job the first time. I wonder how could 1.4M fake accounts be missed when you do an audit looking for ... fake accounts?
Were I a gambling man I'd wager either the analysis was incompetent by design from the very beginning, or the analysis was fine but the numbers were cherry picked to be technically accurate but utterly misleading to the public.
How do you figure out if an account is fake? You look for certain flags -- the customer is deceased, they're an implausible age, they live at a nonexistent address, or perhaps the paperwork to create the account wasn't signed.
Presumably the 1.4M newly discovered fake accounts had some characteristics which they didn't look for on their first pass. Maybe the paperwork to create the account was signed, but it was all signed by the same bank employees rather than by customers. Maybe the paperwork to create one account got photocopied and submitted as the paperwork to create other accounts. You get the idea...
This CNN article has an autoplaying video. All of my attempts to find a way to block the offending content have failed; it starts blocked, but as soon as I scroll down the page, some javascript animation moves the non-existent video to the sidebar. The side-video is hidden, but still loads and plays audio.
Even worse, though I remember the original video being a mere 14 seconds, it is still playing some nonsense. Does it just loop new video downloads until I close the tab? Is there no mercy for bandwidth? [/frustrated]
The new MacOS beta with Safari blocks it by default. Both the big and the small version. It's only failed to stop autoplay once, but that was an earlier beta.
My problem with these autoplaying videos are on mobile, specifically iOS, sometimes I'm just commuting with headphones, open a link for something and those ads begin to autoplay on 4G, even though I have quite a high limit it always makes me angry, stopping my music because the browser took over audio control and after closing the tab my music doesn't start again automatically.
This is really a fucking cancer for web ads, I've been through it all and never got so angry apart from the pop-up era.
I've completely given up reading anythign on mobile, because of that. I read the headlines in GG news, and make sure NEVER to click anything, otherwise they just hijack you.
And then they wonder and plead as to why we use adblockers -- in my case, they actually killed the whole medium of 'mobile news reading'.
95 comments
[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadOur government granted Wells Fargo’s corporate charter, and it can take it away.
Ever since the "collapse" of the over-leveraged and irresponsible firms relying on subprime mortgages and BS credit swaps to boost their stock prices, the government is scared to death to allow anything like that to happen again.
It would take far more than silly accounting fraud to do that, unfortunately.
Or maybe that creates too much risk for the average person to accept.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/investing/wells-fargo-create...
It's sad really. It seems to me that the whole Wells Fargo scandal is ultimately a lesson about how this company abused their employees and set them impossible tasks like "each customer should have X credit cards and Y accounts."
But that's not what people seem to have taken from it. Instead, the whole incident has been presented as "just another big bank defrauding its customers." In reality though, the goal of the fraud was not to enrich anyone, it was just for these employees to keep their jobs.
It feels like this whole incident could have spurred a conversation about the toxicity of these kind of unrealistic sales goals that provide no benefit to the customer, but it didn't.
Some Uber drivers literally have criminal records for driving for Uber, Uber even recruited and paid bonuses for drivers to unknowingly leave counties where they were operating legally to counties they were violating the law, think anyone from Uber corporate is going to jail anytime soon?
Where?
The full statement is 'A few bad apples spoil the barrel' - which comes from the concept that a rotting apple lets off ethylene gas which will cause the apples surrounding it to also turn.
This is probably a better analogy than intended for the companies that incorrectly use it since bad behavior spreads like a corrupting influence through an organization and fixing it would really require larger changes than just getting rid of a couple people.
I'm deeply skeptical of the claim that you can have a few thousand instances of "rot" without there being somewhere higher in the company it's being spread from. If 1% of the company is "rotting", then something in leadership is "rotting".
The analogy is apt, but the question is identifying the bad apples - and asking if those on top are the bad apples spoiling the barrel.
None of them work for Wells Fargo anymore, and most have moved onto tech management or recruiter roles in the area. I'm not close friends but we're still in the same social circles, and I haven't heard of repercussions impacting them.
Needless to say, Wells Fargo has pretty much been filling its own page in ways that no other company has been able (with the exception of Uber): https://suitocracy.com/company/wells-fargo
Seeing it all laid out like that really makes me wonder how it still gets by with so few consequences.
Lobbying and campaign donations, combined with executives going through the revolving door between government and corporate employment.
Too big to fail. Check out the book "Chickenshit Club" if you want to see how this has all evolved since Enron and Arthur Andersen. The Justice Department is frequently paralyzed by politics and fear of causing economic harm to the country. Plus, several changes in legal precedents have made it much more difficult to prosecute companies and their executives.
https://www.amazon.com/Gangster-Capitalism-United-Globalizat...
She said they were the most corrupt orgs she had worked with. Specifically, the Wachovia Construction Loan dept - then later Wells...
All corrupt.
Can I ask where you scrape them from? (Google News?) Is it possible to scrape past headlines from somewhere too, or do you just have to keep up with it every day?
For past news the only one I have been able to use is The Guardian's API, which is free for non-profits such as my Suitocracy project. It's... not great, but it's something. A start.
It's... not a sophisticated system. It misses some major stories, gives me a few false positives, and of course lots of duplicates from differing sources.
But compared to what I had before (basically, nothing) it's a million times better.
I'm no longer a moral fan of his, sorry to say. I know he goes on record as saying he "pays less in tax than his secretary" (not an exact quote) but I think that's just a smart tactic to avoid public critique of his actions (and instead distract with nice words).
“I’ve had this rash on my genitals...”
“SDCs!”
Every problem can be mapped to SDCs
Ah, see, there's where our POVs differ. My tack is that we've been "almost there" on things like speech and hand writing recognition for twenty years or so, and I wouldn't say we're "there" enough that I'd want a comparably competent system driving my car down the road. Adding to that is that from what I'm reading we're not to the level of, say, Alexa yet for SDCs. OTOH, you make good points about the rates of progress in neural nets, so perhaps I'm wrong. Experience says that I'm just as wrong in one direction as the rest of the industry is wrong in the other, and reality will end up somewhere in the middle. So let's check back in ten years. :-)
But I wouldn't be shorting Berkshire Hathaway just yet regardless.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The total damages done to wells custormers are in the low millions, while wells fargo makes upwards of 20 billion a year. What I'm saying is it's a product of a bad incentive system--not criminal master planning by the managements to raise profits.
This was the execution of evil master planning by management, which included indirect rather than direct instruction. They knew that what they rewarded would get done, no matter the law.
The difference is just that you're stealing from your employer, instead of your employer's customers.
The fake accounts were used to make money for managers and executives at Wells Fargo by convincing shareholders, regulators and the company itself that performance was better than in reality.
The victims of this type of fraud are not just the directly impacted consumers, whose damages are not just measured in unwanted fees but also in their damaged credit histories. The bank itself is also a victim -- which means unrelated customers who store their money, stock market investors, and the general public who may have some relationship with Wells Fargo through multiple degrees of separation. Just looking at the bank's misappropriated profits hardly tells the whole story of systemic and pervasive fraud.
1. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-interactive-guide-to-...
2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/07/14/...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_were_made
Generally, this form of English can only be used by certain segments of business and society.
https://stripe.com/wells-fargo/legal
This Wells Fargo Addendum constitutes a legal agreement between you, Stripe, and Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., Canadian Branch (“Wells Fargo”).
Then, I googled "Wells Fargo Canada" and found their website: http://www.wellsfargo.ca/locations
The first sentence on their website is: Our team in Canada is dedicated exclusively to mid-sized and larger companies.
> This Wells Fargo Addendum constitutes a legal agreement between you, Stripe, and Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. and Wells Fargo Merchant Services, L.L.C. (collectively, “Wells Fargo”).
If this were a Democratic administration, or a rational Republican one, I'd say, it's time for the FDIC (too bad Sheila Bair's no longer its head) to come in, take over, and sell off Wells Fargo.
And that we have a Savings and Loan type investigation and prosecution, flipping the smaller fish until we get to the top and lock them up. (And strip them of their ill-gotten personal assets.)
At this point, shareholders should be well informed as to where their growth and profits are coming from. If they want to invest in such behavior, they should equally reap the results, in financial terms.
In other, if currently unrealistically ideal words, "No one is above the law."
At some point, you have to act to effectively put the brakes on such behavior. Otherwise, it takes over.
It's the most hood corporation lmao
#1) but you didn't when it was a democratic administration
#2) why does the party of the president determine what you would say?
The history of too big to fail is littered with discarded ethics and increasing moral hazard on both sides of the aisle (80s, 90s, 00s, and 10s).
It's a good point about "administration", too. I used it as a poor and incorrect stand-in for "majority".
At this point in time, I see some sort of corrective action as more likely from the Democratic side or from those Republicans who do not equate "conservative" with an ideology of personal greed and self-interest. For one point, systemic criminal behavior that also abuses your customer base, does not tend to conserve the institution -- unless it is or is granted quasi-monopoly status where those affected have no means of redress -- nor perhaps meaningful, better alternatives (e.g. an oligarchy of corruption, such as existed in the mortgage and mortgage-backed-securities market leading up to the 2008 crash).
Anyway, yeah, I fear even more our chances in the face of "the majority's" drive to neuter and dismantle existing law and regulation. But I don't believe either side has had too much interest in substantially, not to mention fully, addressing these problems. Not since..... Well, I guess since Carter. And the now seemingly anomalous prosecution of the Savings and Loan scandal in the latter '80's.
Mine's a rather limited perspective. But the string of incidents -- story after story about institutions getting off with fines that pale in comparison to their profits (those at the expense of often massive externalized costs) -- seems pretty apparent.
And actual jail time, as a result of the Savings and Loan malfeasance, did seem to at least produce a "tap on the brakes", for a short time.
In this case, there is no defining line between the two major parties. They both rely heavily on bank lobbyists and come from their stock. There's going to be no changes.
Presumably the 1.4M newly discovered fake accounts had some characteristics which they didn't look for on their first pass. Maybe the paperwork to create the account was signed, but it was all signed by the same bank employees rather than by customers. Maybe the paperwork to create one account got photocopied and submitted as the paperwork to create other accounts. You get the idea...
Even worse, though I remember the original video being a mere 14 seconds, it is still playing some nonsense. Does it just loop new video downloads until I close the tab? Is there no mercy for bandwidth? [/frustrated]
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto...
FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-autop...
Blocks the video without breaking the page
This is really a fucking cancer for web ads, I've been through it all and never got so angry apart from the pop-up era.
And then they wonder and plead as to why we use adblockers -- in my case, they actually killed the whole medium of 'mobile news reading'.