Wells Fargo is getting walloped by its fraudulent-accounts scandal Bob Bryan 2h 2,976

Wells Fargo has seen a dramatic decrease in the number of new accounts opened at the bank in the aftermath of its fake-accounts scandal.

In a release Thursday, the bank announced that the number of new accounts opened in October fell by 27% from September and by 44% from October 2015.

Additionally, Wells said customer-initiated account closings increased by 3% over both the previous month and the same month in 2015.

October was the first full month after the revelations that the bank had opened as many as 2 million accounts for customers without their knowledge. This led to a congressional investigation and the resignation of John Stumpf as CEO.

"In October, we were pleased to see that in general our existing customers were actively using their accounts and valued their relationships with Wells Fargo," Tim Sloan, the bank's new CEO, said in the release.

"As expected, we continued to see declines in new account openings. We remain focused on meeting our customers' financial needs by providing great service and quality products and will provide our next update in mid-December."

Existing-account activity such as debit-card sales remained steady, while other metrics such as teller interactions and customer-satisfaction surveys dipped.