Spam members - why...?

Hello all... In the last few days I've been getting "new" members that are obviously fake... I've got 6 new members with similar user IDs (two names together followed by a bunch of numbers), dubious-sounding e-mail addresses (the e-mail addresses are also names with numbers, but not even close to the User ID, and often the gender of the user ID differs from the gender of the e-mail name) .The profiles are filled including the "description" (some vague, bad English introductions saying where they live, relationship status such as "married two years ago, have two children" etc, and a generic hobby such as "golfing") Harmless stuff really, but the members reek of "fake". My question is really WHY would any spammer bother registering to our site? What's in for them? Why would they waste their time filling up their info? It can well be some automated script or bot that fills in their registration (I'm getting one or two of those "spam" users a day, starting 3 days ago). I'm just very curious why anyone with nefarious intentions would bother registering to our site. I'm certainly "missing something" because I cannot imagine how can these fake memberships can be used for "no good", but if someone is bothering creating fake member users over and over, they must have their reasons, no...? So, why...? Any ideas? It bothers me that I can't figure out their real intentions, although I'm sure they're not "harmless"... :-P

Let me put it this way. If we could print brochures for nothing, every letterbox in the world would receive thousands of meaningless brochures a day.

Or another: They do it because they can!

I was running a competition for a small group of 10 people. I used a popular photo upload script that allowed comments to be added to each photo. In just under two weeks there were over 8,000 spam comments attached to the photos.All were some kind of advertising.

Bots are designed to seek out vulnerable sites and flood them. The person behind the spam doesn't have to do any work, so they're not wasting their time by wasting yours.

It's up to you to make life difficult for these people. Are you running re-captcha, do you ask for a profile photo when joining and more importantly, do you vet new profiles before your members can see them? I think I'm using a setting where a prospective member can only fill in a small part of the profile before being accepted. Or maybe I'm thinking of another site I own that uses a different script.

Hello Demy... Thanks for your feedback... The thing that mystifies me is that there is no advertisement of any kind in these profiles, so maybe they're just checking (and finding?) "vulnerabilities"...? Does it mean that my site has security issues then..? Currently I'm not using captchas or vetting new profiles (trying to make life easier for new real members) and it's really not a problem, as it's just a couple of fake members per day. Actually I'm using these spam members to check my IP tracking using the cPanel vs the time stamp of "last activity" in my Dolphin member info (using the "geeky" view) so in that sense these spammers are helping me to test my IP tracking options etc. But yes if it gets too bad I'll uses captchas etc...

You might try this, https://www.boonex.com/forums/topic/spam-spam-spam-spam-IDEA-.htm#150957

read that and the link there.

After finding a spammer had posted on my test site containing 5 members, I decided to add a math question as per @newton27's post. I made it a little more difficult by asking:

What is 2 plus 2 ? Please answer with a word. (Example: six.)

They have to answer "four".

also keep in mind - spammers have evolved - there are those who will sit there and answer your questions and captchas - only to spam members of your site.

Then charge them $1 to send a message.

https://www.boonex.com/TravelNotes