"-xrumer - Developed by a few russian people and primarily used by russian pharmacies for fraud, this is the most powerful "spammer" too out there. You can literally spend $1k and get 1million backlinks within a matter of days and have your site in the #1 position for whatever keyword you're aiming for."
Sorry bro that ain't true anymore. Xrumer brutal blasts used to rule years ago, but I can assure you that just having a million of crappy profile/forum post links popping up at the same moment nowadays isn't going to help your site ranking as it used to be. It's just not as powerful as it was before the whole xrumer was translated and sold to non-russian speaking folks.
Xrumer is still being deployed by the "big dogs" but not to link your main, "money site" directly. More like to link to other pages with links pointing to your site (or to pages with links to other pages with links to other pages with link to other pages that eventually link to your money site). Never directly, too risky (even though it's debated how risky it is, but still why taking a chance to find it out).
Buying links today means (more like) purchasing services like seolinkvine.com or buildmyrank.com where you buy posts (about the kw you want to target and have on them a contextual link) on network of sites with an high home page Page Rank.
Nonetheless Google is catching up with these networks, recently deindexing a lot of their sites and making their users, who spent lots of money for those links, feel really, really, really bad.
Pros in tough industries had to adapt to Google's algo evolution: they now build their own networks, they put out decent content on them, they provide a good user experience, they tend not to over-optimize, they host them on different A-class IPs, they have their domains registered with different names/addresses/etc, they build multiple tiers of links to their backlinks with custom developed softwares (or Zennoposter) with private proxies and their 24/7 running servers and so on.
It's not a cheap process nor a quick one.
As for now and long-term rankings, spamming isn't just enough.
To be on the safe side you really need to follow Matt Cutt's evergreen advice: build a kick-ass site that even a human reviewer working for Google would love to see on the first spots.
Knowing how easy it was to manipulate google results (and to some extent, it still is) imo that's the right direction from the perspective of a everyday user who's searching for something that's not clicking on Adsense ads or buying something.