Formal Letter to SE about RMT situation.

[AeraLure]

There's really no excuse given that it's a paid subscription game. They need to start banning the IP addresses. There's only a few sites that they use. There's now a bot standing at most marketboards and the newest problem, as mentioned above, is friend invite spam.

[Niwashi]

There's really no excuse given that it's a paid subscription game.

This part I agree with you on. The subscriptions mean that it will stop entirely as soon as SE makes it difficult enough to no longer pay for the cost of their accounts. All it really takes is banning them more quickly, before they have time to make enough money off the account to justify its cost. This can be very hard to do in a F2P game where the costs of setting up new accounts are minimal, but should be easy to do here.

They need to start banning the IP addresses. There's only a few sites that they use.

That might have worked 20 years ago, but it's been a long time since most computers have actually had their own IP addresses. Now, having your own IP address is a special feature you have to pay your ISP extra money for. It's generally only done for web hosting servers, and would certainly not be done for the machines the bots are logging in from.

As for their only using a few sites, they're only advertising a few sites, but those sites are on their web servers, not on the machines they run the game client and bots off of. One of their spam bots could be using the same address today that you'll be on yourself tomorrow as the ISPs shuffle addresses around every time a computer or router re-connects. (In fact, RMT bot farms may well change IP addresses even more often than the rest of us, if they periodically reset their routers in order to do so.)