I really wish it was this easy. There are no easy answers for RMT spam, and quite honestly, the spam is the easiest part for the RMTers to do.


First of all, making a new lvl 1 character to spam RMT ads costs the RMT company $0. The will use stolen credit cards, probably from previous customers, to buy the account for spamming. They will burn through all the characters they can create and then ditch the account. The account will be locked when the owner of the credit card files a chargeback. So banning spamming accounts is really a moot point, it happens anyway. The lvl 1 spambots will touch 0 gil, making them effectively not part of the problem.

The problems are the mule accounts and the farming accounts. Once the gil is farmed it gets transferred to a mule who holds millions of gil at a time and distributes it to people who buy gill from them. Those accounts are not the ones you see, they are quiet and hard to detect. Any automated system to block farming or gil transfers could potentially harm legit players, so all these things must be researched by a live person. What SE will do is look at the gil trail. Lets look at an example

There are two cases of one character transferring 20mil gil to another character. In one case, the research finds that player A crafted and delivered several 3&4 star items for player B, player B gave player A 20 mil gil. In the other case, player C has had no prior contact with player D, player D simply handed player C 20mil. Now is the second example RMT? Maybe, maybe not. What if player D was simply the alt of another character who legit had lots of gil? It takes time and effort to read through the logs to see where the gil is coming from and where it is going.

Think of it in real life terms, lets use drugs as an example. You buy a small amount of drugs from your dealer. You get pulled over and they find the drugs. You will probably get offered a deal for a reduced charge if you tell them who your dealer is. When the police arrest the dealer, they will get offered a deal if they turn in their supplier, and it goes up the chain till they find a major stash of drugs to seize. People are cheap, products are not. It does more damage to a drug cartel to take their product that it does if you arrest their dealers. You will still see dealers in your city or neighborhood, but that doesn't mean your local police don't care if they are there. They are looking up the supply line to find the point where they can actually hurt the boss of the operation.
This works the same way with RMT. Banning the spam bots mean nothing to the company, they are easily replaced with little to no cost. What SE is doing is following the gil back to the source and banning the farming bots and the mules. This actually hurts the company, by destroying their product. Attacking the spammers is like fighting a fire by trying to blow away the smoke. The spammers are a byproduct of the problem, not the problem itself.