The harm adds up, time to prepare and apply, possible time and effort and travel expense wasted if an interview was also conducted. You could say financially it's not a lot to one person, but if 100 people got deceived by the same listing? If 20% of all job listing are like that, maybe 2 million people got deceived in aggregate, now the financial harm total adds up to a lot more. And individually, to an unemployed person, even if the total loss is small, the percentage loss is higher as they likely have no revenue.

You could also argue there is loss to other companies listing real postings, as those fake ones add noise and people might miss their posting and not apply, causing them delays in filling their position.

Plus, if the ghost jobs are to appear to be growing to investors, or to satisfy regulators to justify internal positions or foreign hiring, now there is harm to investors or false compliance to regulations.

And I'd also say, the misrepresentation of demand, might lead people to pursue education in some careers and upskill thinking there is a lot of jobs for those skills, that would be a pretty hefty financial loss if they were mislead.

If I have 1 month of savings after which I lose my house, my car, maybe my marriage, and I invest time into your fake scheme, what is the cost to me in the end? Much more than a few bucks.

If move cross country because the job market in an area looks really good, only there aren't actually any jobs, what is the cost to me in the end?