Has anyone noticed a decrease in botting activity in light of recent events?

[KageTokage]

I just felt throwing it out that if anyone is uncertain of how to identify a gathering bot, there's a very obvious behavior they all share, which is that they cannot take flight while moving. They'll always come to an abrupt stop, jump in place, then start flying. I assume it's due to some limitation in the botting scripts not allowing them to queue multiple movement "inputs" at the same time or some such.

I actually had an idea for that. "Sting ops". So things like bots, RMT, etc, get the GMs to start up a "Sting campaign" designed to try and catch them. Complete with non-GM characters. Act like a normal player interested in the services, reach out, make contact, compile evidence while doing it, and ban once enough evidence has been compiled. Would require more staff, but the effectiveness would be great. Because it's humans doing it, they can adapt to the new moves being played by the offenders, and keep fighting.

This wouldn't work, since as far as I can tell, the RMT farmers strictly use expendable accounts. They form a FC using one of their bots, deposit all of their farmed gil into the FC chest, then if someone wants to buy gil, they'll just invite them into the bot FC, quickly complete the transaction, then continue with their business. They can amass a huge amount of gil in such a short period of time that it's hardly a setback if they get banned, and unless they get banned with such frequency that they can't even get enough gil to make a decent-sized transaction, they're going to keep at it.

The sad thing is is that it's almost guaranteed that anyone who's gullible enough to make a purchase from them is going to get banned once the FC that gave them the money gets cracked down upon, with no lasting consequences for the RMTers.

Prevention is really the only thing that can stop RMT when it's almost fully automated.