Mark Jacobs recently posted about the increasing problem with gold sellers spamming advertisements on chat channels in the game.  Here is what he had to say on how they are dealing with the issue:

For the last few days we've received a number of complaints regarding the increasing number of gold sellers/spammers that some players are seeing. So, I thought now was a good time to update you on our progress and give you some rather interesting statistics.

1) Since WAR has launched, Mythic's CSRs have handled over 100,000 appeals that are gold seller/spammer related. This breaks down to roughly 10,000 per day. While we have a large staff, these appeals now account for 1/2 of all appeals our CSRs see and have to handle in the game.

2) As of this morning, Mythic had already banned 1500 accounts for gold spamming/selling.

Click "More..." below to read the rest.  He goes into detail on where the accounts originate from and the dynamics of the system that they are dealing with.  It's a large problem, but certainly not insurmountable.  We also have a discussion in our forums on the issue.

3) As of this message, we are in the process of permanently banning another 2500 accounts from our game, bringing the total to 4,000 banned so far. We hope that today's banning will significantly slow down the number and frequency of spammers for a little while at least.

4) Most of these accounts belong to a number of individuals/companies who are buying lots of accounts for use by groups/individuals who work with and/or for them. These accounts are not simply individuals who are seeking to make money in our game (which is bad enough) but rather, to well-organized groups that are trying to flood our servers with gold selling messages and gold farming/selling itself.

Since we launched lots of people have asked why they have to accept the EUALA every time they come into the game and I hope that today's actions make that extra effort you are making seem a little more reasonable. We will continue to take aggressive actions against these groups/companies and this is now the second step we are taking against them. If they continue to be a problem we will take other actions as well down the road.

Fighting these people is costing us significant time and effort but it's an effort we are willing to make now and in the future for our players. I hope that the numbers I have laid out will serve as notice to everybody about the scope of the problem and how aggressive Mythic is being in taking action against these groups. I do ask for a bit of understanding though if it does take a little longer to ban these people at times from inside the game as our guys/gals are trying hard to keep up with the number of appeals. While we have hundreds of CSRs and support staff, the sheer volume of these appeals can be a bit daunting at times. We will continue to ban them while at the same time, our engineering team works on ways to further minimize their impact and make it easier for our players to join in the fight against these groups/companies.

I thank all of our players for your help and cooperation so far, we will not let you down.

Mark