Do you have CAPTCHA enabled to help keep them out in the first place?
Bots decode those easily, easier than humans can probably, I turned it off on my forum since it doesnt do any good
I deleted all the spammers accounts that registered on my forum, they arent that hard to pick out, usually a very strange name, they also will usually have an out of the country IP address and will have selected their default time zone as gmt-12, there is a mod to deny registrations if they select that time zone, since I installed it back in february I have yet to have a spambot register