What are the purposes of bots signing up for emails and accounts on websites?
Summary
What email marketers say11Marketer opinions
Email marketer from Quora answers that spam bots are used to collect email addresses, promote products or services, spread malware, and for phishing attempts.
Email marketer from StackOverflow answers that one of the common reasons for spambots is to post malicious links, which are dangerous for visitors.
Email marketer from Reddit shares that spam bots sign up to websites to test email deliverability, to check for data breaches, and to create email lists for future attacks.
Email marketer from Reddit explains that bot accounts can be used to test the resilience of a website, for search engine optimization (SEO), and to cause havoc on the internet.
Email marketer from Email Geeks suggests bots may be attempting to fill inboxes with legitimate mail while acting as a canary.
Email marketer from Blackhatworld shares that email spam bots are used for mass spamming, phishing, selling harvested data, and/or using the accounts later for other reasons.
Email marketer from Email Geeks shares an anecdote where someone they know had their credit card points stolen due to email-bombing.
Email marketer from Email Geeks explains they tell customers that securing their forms is about mail-bombing to hide connection notifications but also suggests "some people are just sociopaths".
Email marketer from StackExchange explains that the bots can be used to populate forums with spam content and links, used to artificially inflate site statistics, such as page views and traffic or for phishing purposes.
Email marketer from Spiceworks shares that spam bots collect email addresses to create lists for mass spam campaigns, for phishing, or to sell those lists to other spammers.
Email marketer from SitePoint explains that the purpose of bot sign ups can be to post spam comments or links, but also to test forms for vulnerabilities.
What the experts say4Expert opinions
Expert from Email Geeks explains that bot sign-ups can help bad actors find websites with default, insecure, or outdated plugins, and also test for XSS or SQL injection vulnerabilities.
Expert from Word to the Wise explains that comment spam bots are primarily filling out forms because they see an available box to input information.
Expert from Email Geeks shares research indicating that bot sign-ups are often comment spam, mailbombing attempts to hide 2FA emails, or just random acts of sociopathy.
Expert from Email Geeks states that it doesn't have to be one reason, but could be all of the reasons and more.
What the documentation says4Technical articles
Documentation from Microsoft shares that spammers automatically generate accounts on a massive scale and use them to distribute unsolicited messages. They also harvest valid addresses to build mailing lists.
Documentation from Cloudflare explains that bots sign up for accounts to perform credential stuffing attacks, account takeovers, spamming, and launching denial-of-service attacks.
Documentation from Imperva explains that bad bots are used for web scraping, data harvesting, competitive data mining, denial of service, transaction fraud, and spamming. They can also be used for account creation fraud, comment spam and other malicious activities.
Documentation from OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) explains that bots create fake accounts for various malicious purposes, including spamming, spreading malware, skewing online polls, and conducting fraud. They also perform web scraping.