And how would you prove they were botting? By just watching them? See if they run the same pattern? Sure, they could look like a bot, though there are addons that allow you to create routes for gathering, but ignoring that and many of the behaviors that players exhibit that could be misinterpreted for botting, say the account is closed.
What happens when they appeal? In a day, week, month, year? Would you be okay with losing your account and the only evidence is “I watched the character, it looked like a bot”?
We do actually take action on suspected bots all the time, using evidence that can be double checked months later.
Other suspected bots are investigated because there are many methods out there and we use them to try and figure out what kind of foot print they leave so that we can either block them outright or develop detection methods to find them when they are botting. It is also important to keep in mind there are different versions of bots out there, so two bots may be running two entirely different programs.
Your theory is that because we feel it makes a bigger impact to hit as many bots as we can at once that it is so they all buy new accounts to bring in more money? That is beyond ridiculous, Poisonberry, and illustrates that you don’t understand who the botters are.
The majority of botters are not using legitimate accounts, they are either compromsied (stolen from legitimate users) or purchased with stolen credit cards. So in the end, we don’t make anything from the sale of those accounts, in fact we lose money because now we have to deal with charge backs and other complications from illicit purchases like that.
It only looks nefarious when you don’t put any real thought into it.