In phenomenological applications, time evolutions of Bloch-Redfield type are widely adopted for modelling open system dynamics, despite their nonpositive preserving character: this physical inconsistency, that in general shows up at small times, is usually cured by suitably restricting the space of allowed initial states. Nevertheless, additional problems may arise in relation to entanglement: specifically, we show that Redfield dynamics, though being a semigroup, can generate entanglement through a purely local action; moreover, this unphysical effect can persist on long time-scales.