It does at least raise the bar on how much you need to make from an account before it gets shut down. If each account was making $50 before getting canned then

It does at least raise the bar on how much you need to make from an account before it gets shut down. If each account was making $50 before getting canned then it wouldn't make sense at $99/account. This of course assumes they aren't just stealing credit card numbers and using those to sign up. In that case the higher account price is not much of a barrier. Another way to look at this is Google made $2.4M off of these spammer accounts. Not a lot for a Google sized company, but it's still not nothing.