The Tether fraud is worse than it seems.

Obviously fraud is bad, who is really hurt? Speculators?

The answer is everybody on the planet.

1. Tether is used to signal a false price for the limited Bitcoin Core chain in a hope that once the fork is "decided" by the "market", Bitcoin Cash supporters would simply give up.
2. But we can't give up without giving up on cryptocurrency in general (neglecting XMR, DASH, etc). BCH outperforms BTC in every way: so the price of BTC can't be allowed to fall below the price of BCH.
3. November of 2017 shit hits the fan. Price of BCH rises to 0.2BTC each. Every major exchange halts trading simultaneously through some combination of excessive load, DDOS, or exchanges over-reliant on BTC pairs just letting things cool off.
4. Now the price of BTC can't even be allowed to fall. Market manipulation happens in earnest: distorting the market.
5. The "market" is telling miners to mine BTC to the detriment of everything else. Due to nicehash only paying out in BTC, this has spill-over effects into ASIC-resistant mining as well.
6. This leads to the first [second, depending how you count] video card shortage. I bought my "white elephant" quad CPU machine because I was not interested in bidding for GPUs.
7. Things settle down, and I am able to buy a GPU for a reasonable price. But now hardware vendors know there is a (distorted) demand for mining . They need to put in their order at TSMC 2 years ahead of time.
8. 2019: the large chip buys based on anticipated mining demand (not discouraged by the continued high price of BTC) lead to a chip shortage.
9. 2020: pandemic hits, straining supply chains. Computer demand skyrockets with people working from home. I watch as even the crappiest 15W video cards sell out at my local retailers (was considering buying one, but figured others needed them more).
10. People start to notice that BTC, and by implication all cryptocurrency, is essentially a Ponzi scheme. They start to ask questions like: why does it use so much power if hardly anybody uses it? (I firmly believe such questions would be a lot more muted if BCH was the dominant coin: because it actually has a use-case.)

So in summary: Tether distorted the market so much that they screwed over the global economy; and possibly the environment for the next 50 years at the same time.