Juan Felipe Rincon, Webmaster Outreach at Google, talked about spam reports and manual actions at SMX West.  And one thing he revealed is about how Google prioritizes received spam reports.

When you submit a spam report, you can do it within your Search Console account or without one.  If you do it within Search Console, you also receive confirmations from the spam report being submitted.

But it seems Google is also using the spam reports within Search Console to help prioritize the many spam reports received.  Rincon said that Google recently began prioritizing these spam reports so that if you have submitted multiple spam reports that were truly spam that were acted on, your spam reports would be given a higher priority as a trusted source.

If you submit spam reports to Google, especially for spam within your niche, it would be more beneficial to you if you really do help clean up the space from spam by submitting valid reports, and not just randomly reporting competitors for tiny almost non-existent tiny violations.

Rincon didn’t say if it has anything where it would lower the priority on some spam reports based on other things such as repeated non-spam reports being filed.