There was this guy. He controlled the ore market and the herb market.
He would be online from around 10 am to 3 am. He would buy within seconds of being posted any auction that fell below a set price.
His botting software worked a bit like Auctioneer's "Snatch", only that instead of stopping after taking one snapshot of the market, his was on continuously making loops on and on and on.
In addition, his botting software could auto-buy auctions while scanning at the same time. This concept works a bit like the Track-While-Scan mode of Westinghouse's APG-66 F-16 Falcon radars for those in the know.
His software enabled him to have almost real time updates on the market while allowing him to auto-buy whatever auctions he had set it to at the same time.
I suspected him after posting a number of single auctions of different items only to have them bought by him within seconds of being posted. After this happened a few times, I checked for the name of the person who was thusly buying up my single item auctions and so came to know and track him.
After noting the same behaviour over several weeks I finally understood that he was using some kind of advanced botting AH software.
I made a ticket to Blizzard about him describing all the above. It's been over 10 days and I haven't seen him again, which may mean that he finally got perma banned for botting.
Interestingly enough, this was a guy who did supervised botting. I had whispered him a couple of times and he replied back, so he wasn't afk botting. Still Blizzard nailed him. I suspect that he had gotten previous bans for botting and this last one was a perma ban.
I guess it feels good they nailed him.
On a related issue, a very famous AH botter from my server got banned during the last ban wave which happened around 30 days ago. This bot controlled the LW market, posting hundreds of auctions per day of LW mail and leather gear. This guy was fully automated, he would log, mass cancel auctions and then mass re post them and log out. We are talking about several dozens of auctions per session. It took him about 2-3 minutes to do all that.
This LW bot logged in one day and then got immediately offline. I had him friended so that I would log whenever he logged out and undercut him. I suspect he started his botting software and then got insta banned. He probably got insta-banned once he pressed the "start" button on the bot :-). I suspect him of using something similar to a very famous botting software used for BG botting.
Unfortunately, there are several more bots, some easily found online at sites such as WoW Auction. A specific very famous AH bot on my server, had posted 318,164 auctions in the year 2013 according to WoW Auction.
This works out to 871 auctions per day.