It's not rocket surgery

[Niwashi]

RMTs tend to go to the MMOs where the most cash can be made. If an mmo had decreasing amounts of RMTs this pretty much came due a decline in its popularity and thus the amount of people willing to buy currency with real money.
Not due to measures taken.

The change in LOTRO was nearly instantaneous, from having as much RMT as we see here the day before a patch to a scattered few the first day after that patch and none at all by the second day after that patch (nor any day thereafter). What's more, it happened when the game was only something like two or three months old, and still extremely popular.

Believing that was just the gold sellers losing interest is what sounds naive to me.

Edit:
(This was when the right-click "Report RMT" option was added to the chat log, along with an update in how Turbine filtered out chat that had recognizably RMT strings in it, and probably some other back-end rules they didn't tell us about.)