Bill -

I've seen a big push from spammers lately over on the sailFar board. Most of them are from either the Far East, Russia, or Amsterdam. In fact, the latest member here, the esteemed "Dr. Montana Jreed", I banned him from joining just a few days ago because his IP resolved to Amsterdam, IIRC. A quick Google of that login name shows him to be a member of many, many different and diverse forums, yet he doesn't post on any. Link:

Dr. Montana Jreed

I'm not sure what they are up to, they've gone beyond their old address-harvesting tricks to some sort of new tactic that is less obvious. I think they perhaps use the membership as a way to try and exploit software vulnerabilities from within the user account system. Hard to tell, because after joining, they are usually not active... Perhaps they just do their work really fast.