Is there a reason for spam accounts only sending a single message?
Every once in awhile, when I get a spam message on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, etc), I chat for a bit just to see what the strategy is, do a Turing test, etc. Typically, I used to get a few messages that mostly ignore the questions I ask, and then send me a link to some website asking for my credit card details or something. Every once in awhile, I'd find that even though it seemed to be a spam account, someone seeming to be a human being would chat with me for days. Once, I found that it was actually an ex trying to stalk me. But lately, I've noticed that a lot of these spam accounts send a single, one word message, like "Hello", "Hola" or an emoji, and then never respond to any messages, never send any links, never actively try to get anything from me at all. So my question is, is there some sort of spam or fishing strategy that I'm missing here? Am I falling for something without realizing it? Are these just lazy scammers?
I would guess that their automated spam capacity is way higher than the human capacity to respond to their newly-acquired leads.
"Leads" are free in this case, so they're spamming the initial message as much as possible because it doesn't cost them anything (and better have too many than not enough), but then their capacity to follow-up on those is much more limited so they're selective in the ones they follow-up with.
Chances are that they're unsure of how well a particular spam message will perform, so they spam it as much as possible and then realize they got more than they bargained for so they don't have enough resources to attend to all the responses.
Tech-wise, keeping track of leads is much more difficult. It requires essentially building an entire CRM, while an outbound-only spambot is a self-contained script with no persistent storage that just scrapes some popular post/hashtag for its targets and then sends a spam message to each one.
Perhaps it’s an account aging / warning strategy- show some history for years before sending spam out later. Social media sites usually limits new accounts - so a lot of messages or links off the bat might get them banned.
Perhaps they intend to resell your contact information.
An account that responded in any way to spam is likely worth 10x one that did not.
My suspicion is that when you reply, you're marking your account as vulnerable, and they're keeping their older more trustworthy accounts around to sample with
Maybe they tried to send a second message, but it got blocked by a spam filter.