No they existed in FFXI before WoW even came out...
As for the slow banning...it's probably because the GMs don't have the authority to banhammer. Regardless of how blatently obvious it is they have to escalate and trigger an investigation especially with cases of people's accounts being hacked and used to bot spam gil shouts etc. They don't wanna banhammer a legit account. I hope they figure out what sites are the phishers. It's all good to come out and say sites are phishing people's account info but without site names people can't avoid them.