It’s an easy and cheap way for fake accounts to gain access to a larger audience.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/fake-accounts-pop-twitter-legac...
Indeed. That's why it's effective for reducing spam, since spammers who run thousands of bot accounts aren't going to verify each of them unless their spamming activity generates at least $8 per account. Most spamming activities generate far less revenue, so those become unprofitable, and the overall amount of spam goes down.
That’s a different problem. The parent is referring to the cheap high-volume spam/scams that have proliferated every corner of the free internet. These only work because they’re extremely cheap. There’s a reason your email inbox receives 10,000x more spam than your physical mailbox.
Buying an account doesn't give you un-suspendable account.
All spam detection techniques are applied to paid accounts and they are removed as well.
This not only raises the cost but difficulty.
Just having money is not enough. Detecting 10+ payments from the same credit card is trivial.
There aren't infinite amounts of valid credit cards or Apple accounts to be used for verification.
And impersonating someone could easily make a lot more than $8 in a very short time.