I have noticed a change in the friend requests lately and I don't get any tells any more at least on Pheonix. The distribution of gill sellers seems fairly random and has no barring on population of the server from what I can tell. We also have minimal bots from what I can see.

I had a friend request from a gil seller the other day and before I could go through the motions of saying no it had been removed automatically presumably because he was banned. So they may be doing something but just not saying anything as that was too fast for anything but an automated system to catch.