I'm surprised that all you guys on JP servers think it's the virtue of the Japanese people that's stopping Gil sellers from appearing in force there. Actually no, I really shouldn't be. Of course you guys think it's the power of glorious nippon.

It's population. On Balmung, I don't get tells like... at all. Why? Cause bots can't get in. The character creation restrictions mean that creation of throwaway bots for advertising is much much harder, so you don't get that much spam. You'll see swarms of bots appear after maintenance, cause that's when pop is the lowest and they can get some new (computer non-)blood in.
This game is weird that way, the more popular your server is the harder it is to get bots onto it. Now where's there a lot of population playing this game?