hitting them in the wallet is the best way to get them to stop posting rubbish. (Which will make the forum better for everyone.)
From what I've seen over the years, getting rid of obvious spam makes some of the spammers switch to something that's much harder to detect.
When plagiarism got busted, they switched to a homograph attack. When that was made impossible (by theymos), they switched to word spinners. Now it's AI-spam. The main problem is: it becomes less and less obvious what's spam, and more time consuming to detect.