The problem is that that third party is complicit in allowing this ecosystem to exist. If they would just pony up a dollar or two a month, they could exist in a world without spammers. That's all it would take.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.