GigaFemto said:
Somebody must be making money on this to make it worth the effort. I know it isn't much work on their part, but it does cost them something.
--GF
Usually the signup is done by a bot program. You'd be surprised at how much money is made in spam scams. Often, once the scammers figure out how to beat the registration challenges (most have a pattern) they will launch a few dozen signups per day. What still has me in awe is the amount of plain old email spam that goes around.
Lately, I've noticed that some of the spam accounts here are posting replies to legitimate threads. This is designed to make the account "trusted." This is usually done by a real person. After some time, the account(s) can be sold to a real spammer and the account will start to have taglines with links or just plain go rogue. Trusted accounts may take weeks to get removed on some sites.
There are many businesses who have just spam as the way to get "customers." A lot of the "pharma" spam actually results in the real product being shipped. The more an item is likely to be reordered and the quality can be judged by the customer, the more likely the spammer will deliver the real thing, or a very good approximation (never underestimate the placebo effect).
Fun Fact: The US is responsible for just as much automated spam as comes from China. Only Russia has more.
Kudos to Jomebrew, Brad and the other moderators for keeping spam under control. This is a very enjoyable site due to their efforts.
PS: If you want an eye opening and often hilarious education on spam, google "scambaiting". But please, don't try that on your own. There are very real risks involved.