You don’t need to be a programmer to fish out bots. Just ‘/who Hunter 60’ and see all of the ones in Scarlet Monastery, Felwood, Tanaris, Winterspring and Burning Steppes. If simply observed for long enough, you can see the tell-tale signs of them being a bot. Anyone with admin privileges could turn themselves invisible and teleport to any player in the game. The would clearly see the botting happening. Or even give them a simple challenge that a human can pass that a program can’t.
Especially the ones with randomly generated names and chinese-lettering pet names. And I don’t mean character-creator randomized names, I mean an actual incoherent string of letters. 9 times out of 10 there’s not a person playing behind the screen.
Given what Blizzard is capable of, lack of results, and the incentive; this is the most likely answer.