in my opinion the time spent fighting botters is wasted. Each time new security is added they evolve a way around it and will continue to do so .(they enjoy the challenge) they are hackers after all and get off doing it.
as long as people want gold there is gonna be a market for botters. they dont speak in game its all done via texts and skype which makes it very hard to track, the amounts sold are not easy amounts to track like 10 000 000 gold its done like 10 234 654 making it harder to track still, and then they result in putting shop items in the tm for crazy prices and the botters buy it from them and they send the rl money.
now in my 13 years of mir ive never played a server where gold is so readily availible from botters and im not joking!
i think the only solution to this problem is the server team give us the option to buy from them and let the money go back into server for research and construction!
i love this server more then most ive played its highly addictive

which means ur doing somthing right i suppose.
i wish u the best of luck solving the botter issue.
just because i wana say so i would estimate over 50k pounds been spent on this server between players and botters, thats 50k the team could of had to improve the server and employ full time staff.