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.
I would imagine that spammers who need some throwaway accounts to make a few shitbumps probably wouldn't pay the evil fee - not worth it. But what could happen is that someone has a bot to probe different IPs until they find a "clean" one (without an evil fee), then register a bunch of "free" accounts on it and keep them until needed. Or sell them to spammers in bulk. If that's what's happening - there should be a reasonable limit of how many accounts can be registered from one IP.
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.
Yeah this system is quite rude to new users. Perhaps there could be an approval process so that instead of the evil fee the new user is placed on probation until someone reviews their posts and confirms that it's not a spambot. I think hilariousandco had suggested some sort of a newbie review system. This could be outsourced to the community to avoid overloading moderators.
Registering accounts itself dirties the IP and you can only get away with creating something like 6-10 accounts from a completely clean IP before more accounts start getting charged the evil fees..