The important words there are "knowingly."
I have been banned and I never took any action designed to get me free stubs. For one thing, just like last year, I am able to steadily collect cards and complete my sets just by playing the market. And my transaction history will show I spend hundreds of hours on the game doing just that.
I cannot accept that you would believe that if there were a few transactions here and there that triggered the glitch that I did so on purpose.
Again, I am certain you will find two groups of players caught up in this:
Group 1:
Cancelled queue of buy orders from computer that contained both buys and sells;
The buy orders were set at the current market price;
The queue was not re-set and then re-deleted after this happened - in other words, this "glitch" would only appear randomly for these people within their history.
These are not intentional cheaters.
Group 2:
Cancelled queue of buy orders from computer that contained only buy orders;
Buy orders were for well above market price (meaning, they were not intending them to actually go through);
The queue was re-set and then re-deleted, and so on - accumulating stubs over and over.
These are the cheaters.
Both groups would be marked by the sweep.
Many people on these forums and others (and many who we know in real life, etc.) are heavy traders and have the profile of Group 1 - yet without any chance to find out what exactly triggered the ban, and without knowing the methodology (or even that the actual data was further analyzed to determine which Group the player belongs in) we cannot be confident of the result.
As of now, I am certain most of the banned posters are simply high-volume traders and a small percentage are straight cheaters.
So, you are saying to all those that were caught "deal with it, you deserve it," when it is clear a number of people swept up in this were not cheating.
Just saying SDS can do whatever they want per the TOC doesn't mean that what they are doing is valid. In this case, they have not been transparent as to what they have detected and how they can be sure they have filtered out Group 1's from being banned. Instead, they (at least per Ramone) simply say, "we are 100% sure" yet they do not elaborate one bit on why they are so sure. And again, these people who claim they are 100% sure are the same people that developed the game with many bugs (not complaining) and many glitches - including stubs and card giveaway glitches. I don't believe SDS has earned the right to simply say, "It is - because we say so."