I believe the friend request disables the ability to quickly black list people until you have dealt with their friend request. The interesting thing to me is why this is a beneficial business strategy for RMT? I can't imagine that annoying potential customers is a viable method of gathering consumers.

There are several automated methods that could be implemented and have been proven quite effective for other online games at handling the RMT plague. It remains a question of why SE in particular has never taken it as seriously as they could. A thousand ignored suggestions over the entire course of their MMO exposure hasn't changed their inadequate stance on this issue.