Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

This is willful labor theft and at this scale, a single fake job posting could cause thousands or tens of thousands of hours of wasted labor on the part of job seekers. Multiply the prevailing hourly wage equivalent for that job by the number of applicants and how much time it would have taken them to apply (Workday users, you're doomed!). That's how much money was stolen from the public by the company. Prosecute it like any other theft of that amount. It'll only take a couple of cases like this for every legal department across the country to tell HR and recruiting to stop the practice immediately.

Your assumption is that this is being perpetrated by humans! But, what if AI has already, secretly become sentient, and started posting all these fake/ghost job postings...as part of their efforts to begin a mass campaign to slow overall human productivity...and as part of *its* plan to dominate/takeover humanity! /s

But there is no basis in law for any of these objections.

"Wasting peoples' time" is a byproduct of every activity in a less-than-perfectly-efficient economy (which is all of them, obviously).

"Wasting lots of peoples' time, and leaving them disappointed and emotionally/economically fragile" is ... crappy and miserable. But it's still legal.

Even if there was a law against posting unrealistic job descriptions, or posting for jobs that don't exist, it's near-impossible to distinguish those cases from legitimate corporate "changes in direction" which cannot be made illegal.