Here's a few answers, in order of likeliness, IMO. 1) Some spam services (think Fiverr backlinks or other low-quality marketing like that) get paid for getting

Here's a few answers, in order of likeliness, IMO. 1) Some spam services (think Fiverr backlinks or other low-quality marketing like that) get paid for getting links to appear on a page: it doesn't matter if it's nofollow or a low-quality, obvious spam link. They just want to meet their quota and get paid. They're essentially taking advantage of desperate businesses who want to build up their links. 2) Even obvious spam links get some clicks, if only out of people clicking by accident or out of curiosity or boredom. If you have some dumb process that can get you 1,000 nofollow blog comments scattered around the web a month, and each of those links gets just 1 real click a month, that's not a bad outcome if it's a repeatable, semi-scalable process. 3) Nobody except Google knows exactly how their algorithm works, but is there actually any proof that nofollow links don't have some benefit to sites for search engine appearance? Perhaps even chance of a marginal sliver of a benefit for spamming out links is considered better than nothing.