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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

The spammer in the article makes two thousand dollars a day from his army of spambots. Even if he started running two thousand bots on monday, he'd be pulling a profit by tuesday.

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Payment would be the unique identifier. Creating a ton of email addresses to uniquely identify each account is easy. It's a lot hard to find multiple unique payment methods so you won't show up as the same person.

Does Paypal not allow multiple accounts tied to the same bank account?

I've received a notice that I couldn't add a credit card because the number was already on my wife's account. Not sure if the same is true for checking accounts, but I'd imagine so.

They don't allow that. My wife tried to add her checking account to a business-related paypal account, but it was already on her personal account so they didn't let her connect it.

What you should do is unconnect it. The very last thing you want to do is to give paypal unfettered access to your checking account.

Yes, but they are also quick disable an account with suspicious activity. Some would say too quick.

You really only need the account for about five minutes, in order to register your spambot.

Why would you tie your paypal account to a bank account?

To get money out. (I don't have mine tied, because I don't receive any money via paypal, and probably never will because of all of the horror stories.)

Anyway, you can easily exchange "bank account" with "credit card" - and it seems that they don't allow that sort of thing, based on the other comments in this thread.

You can buy foreign Paypal accounts for $100-200.

If the unique id didn't work out you could charge per post instead. Spammers would post more than other users. Extra accounts or not. Is there any way to make payments like this easy?

Sounds like I should take up Pinterest spamming.

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