In 2017, the cryptocurrency market was called the Wild West because there was no regulation.
Everyone could issue their tokens and sell wherever they wanted.
Market capitalization grew due to rising prices
shitcoins, which are no longer there or they cost very little.
I think that now this is impossible to repeat, people have become smarter and government agencies have learned to find fraudsters and prosecute.
Things have changed but not that much, there's always people hungry for $ and back in 2017 there were less restrictions than now it was a lot easier to automate everything and make money from almost nothing.
There are some significant changes in the forum that reduced the amount of "bounty hunters" and put the brake on the spam but they are not gone completely. People still developing and selling accounts, and the sig spammers and bounties hunters will be more and more.
When this happens you'll see the difference .

The post is on 5 July 2020, months ago but total nuked accounts is 65770, that is far higher than 15936 (the gap between 2984822 and 3000758)
Whatever data is displayed on the
statistics page, I am absolutely sure that this gap between the numbers is connected exclusively with deleted accounts,
(since the deleted accounts are currently 16,117). And the discrepancy between the numbers presented here and the numbers displayed on bpip.org is another question. Perhaps this is due to the update intervals, given that at the moment, for example, I see that
btcnfan's profile has been online for a total of 23184d ...
The stats page is not reliable source of info. Many of the stats are wrong, but it's not worth it go waste time on adjust them when you have many other 3rd party projects tracking even more stats.