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.

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.

Apple is 99/year

Google is a one time payment.