"RMT vendors will often obstruct normal players gameplay activity"

[Espon]

This is why I'm confused as how the phishing scams are able to be as successful as they are, because logic would dictate they have to be pooling all of the stolen gil somewhere and the fact that they use the phished accounts to perpetuate the scam provides a common thread that can be followed.

With the gil cap being only a billion, they probably have thousands of accounts spread over all servers and data centers to hold it all. I don't doubt that some of them get banned judging by what's posted weekly on the lodestone, but it's like pulling a few weeds out of your garden and hoping the rest go away. Unfortunately, many people continue to fall for the phishing scams, further supplying them with gil and accounts for their business.

[SamSmoot]

WoW had a good idea with RMT bots. If you reported one, you never saw anything they posted from then. Unfortunately, that personal shadow ban only lasted for your current login session, and sometimes you had to report up to 30 of them to make them all disappear. Reporting them should make them disappear for at least 30 days, bu which time they've probably been banned and come back with new names.

Ideally, SE should shadow ban them based on text in their messages, like their site URL's which never change.

[SassyAssassin]

Never played the game but a 5 second google search gave bunch of ESO forums that had messages from 2021 and 2022 complaining that people bot and nothing is done about it I guess its all about not every player encountering them in normal play

Yes of course, I mentioned that was about five to six years ago on playstation EU, but those suckers get better at it by the year it seems

[Jojoya]

WoW had a good idea with RMT bots. If you reported one, you never saw anything they posted from then. Unfortunately, that personal shadow ban only lasted for your current login session, and sometimes you had to report up to 30 of them to make them all disappear. Reporting them should make them disappear for at least 30 days, bu which time they've probably been banned and come back with new names.

Ideally, SE should shadow ban them based on text in their messages, like their site URL's which never change.

SE also does that here. I'll frequently come across obvious RMT ad bots near the main Aetherytes that are totally silent.

The problem is that the people creating the ad messages will switch the text to avoid the automatic detection. When that happens, SE needs players to report them then they need to add the new textstrings to their detection programming.

It's a neverending battle.