Hello,
We ask them to verify and we submit the verification to our DB, or they submit the verifications in the form:
https://hivewatchers.com/verifications/new

You can browse verified accounts here:
https://hivewatchers.com/verifications

Being verified does not mean that the user has not committed some abuse or that the account will not be prone to our investigations for any abuse.
It is simply verification that they are who they claim to be outside of Hive blog.
From these 1103 reports for Spam, I estimate that about 1000 were reports for this type of abuse.

The most common activity is tricking the community by deleting that old post to cover up detection and then reposting this content again after a while. Sometimes in a different language.