Every lower tier zone is riddled with bots nowdays, atleast on Bloodfang. You can see the same bot running past month in the Desolace, now accompanied with other bots. Each racking roughly 15k gold a month for whoever is running them.
Similarly you see leveling bots running in Ashenvale, only attacking the target type which drops the higher priced blues.
You can interrupt the bots, tag their target, etc. and they just keep on going. You can kite mobs to them, kill them, report them, send mail to some hacks@blizzard.com email and nothing happens.
In vanilla you could open a ticket, get a GM to finish the bot off and move along. In classic it seems that the money for the sub is worth more than banning the botter.
By running the same pattern in front of the bot for few hours, calculating the average g/hour and extrapolating it by multiplying the result with 24*30.
15k gold is very low tbh if they run nonstop. Farming just 300gold in a 12 hr farm span is a very low estimate it would be closer to atleast 40g per hour thats 40x23(there is some downtime sending the mats,repair etc)=920per dayx30 days= 27600 gold! Per Month!
I’m quite certain that reporting to hacks@blizzard.com does help. They don’t “finish them off” right away, because they monitor them. They have to, in order to learn how it works, learn how to detect it en masse so that they can not just ban 1 bot user, but anyone who uses this version of the bot on any server in the future.
Then people make new bots and the cycle begins anew. It’s a cat and mouse game.