>"Suppose you were a Wells Fargo depositor and a Wells Fargo teller opened a fake account in your name without consulting you. What harm did you suffer?"
Are you joking? The fake accounts were set up in order to bilk customers out of money in the form of overdrafts fees and penalties.
"Some customers noticed the deception when they were charged unexpected fees, received credit or debit cards in the mail that they did not request, or started hearing from debt collectors about accounts they did not recognize. But most of the sham accounts went unnoticed, as employees would routinely close them shortly after opening them. Wells has agreed to refund about $2.6 million in fees that may have been inappropriately charged."[1]
It also probably impossible to quantify the time customers lost having to deal this. But I think it safe to say it was significant.
>"How massive is this fraud if you measure it in a more useful way than "number of accounts"
OK lets use dollar amounts as a metric - $2.6 million dollars in fees, levied against your own customers? And considering Well Fargo found an additional 1.4 million previously undisclosed fake accounts as recently as August[2] and that the regulatory probe has now widened beyond their retail banking unit and not includes their private wealth division I would say pretty fucking massive.
It's really interesting that you seek to trivialize the scope and severity of a story you seem to know so very little about.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/09/business/dealbook/wells-f...
[2] http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/31/investing/wells-fargo-fake-a...
[3] https://www.barrons.com/articles/federal-probe-expands-to-we...