FR, up until yesterday, what you said was true. The loan bots didn't post in threads, but merely took advantage of the birthday list. However, yesterday, one of the loan bots posted an introduction thread in the member introductions section. And it wasn't just a random spam post, but an actual introduction! Unfortunately, many bots can be repurposed. All they need is for their master to feed them new instructions and new scripts to follow.
Anyway, yes, it's pretty easy to spot the spam posts. But, the mods have said that posting the links all in one thread makes their job that much easier, so I try to do my part.