All registered in 2018, all started posting in 2020. These accounts did not have "Never" as their last active date when they were dormant so I'm still fairly confident that "Never" means something different than just a reserve force for future spamming... likely the evil fee.
True, you are probably right.I just though that one part of the accounts I mentioned might have been be in that "never" group before waking up, since I noticed that those spamming groups for some reason like to use old accounts that have been completely inactive. On top of that, it looks like they have unlimited supply of those.
The more I think about it the more it looks like a problem for legitimate users who register through e.g. Tor than a real impediment for spammers who can automate it and upon finding a "clean" IP register a large number of accounts through it.
For some reason it became relatively common issue in Croatia. I have a few friends who got that evil fee thing (and I heard about more cases ) even though they had nothing to do with bitcointalk before I finally talked them into joining. Naturally, when they saw this thing they didn't want to have anything with the forum. Sure, they could circumvent this thing by trying registering from someplace else, but simple registering on the forum shouldn't be such a hassle, especially now when there are many different platforms and people can choose.