How much do they make off a set of scam/spam apps? If it's at least a 10x margin over the $99 fee, it just seems like a likely gamble for being worth it. If it's 100x, then it's overhead cost.

At that point, it only hurts legitimate indy devs who aren't gaming the system.

It does at least raise the bar on how much you need to make from an account before it gets shut down. If each account was making $50 before getting canned then it wouldn't make sense at $99/account.

This of course assumes they aren't just stealing credit card numbers and using those to sign up. In that case the higher account price is not much of a barrier.

Another way to look at this is Google made $2.4M off of these spammer accounts. Not a lot for a Google sized company, but it's still not nothing.

Apple is 99/year

Google is a one time payment.