"Approximately 85,000 of the accounts opened incurred fees, totaling $2 million. Customers' credit scores were also likely hurt by the fake accounts.[43] The bank was able to prevent customers from pursuing legal action as the opening of an account mandated customers enter into private arbitration with the bank."
"The bank paid $110 million to consumers who had accounts opened in their names without permission in March 2017." The money repaid fraudulent fees and paid damages to those affected."[1]
That's 85,000 of what you call "non-existent" fees totaling 2 million dollars. And whether or not those were secondary effects of the fraud is completely immaterial.
It's a rather bizarre position to want to defend a bank that not only defrauded its customers but has also admitted to doing so. But you are entitled to that. What you aren't entitled to however is your own alternative facts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scan...
> "The bank was able to prevent customers from pursuing legal action as the opening of an account mandated customers enter into private arbitration with the bank."
That's really not going to work if the customer didn't intend to open the account. The fact that (by your numbers) average damages among those who were damaged at all were up to $23.50 may have had more to do with lack of legal action by customers.
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...