Hey another Newbie i really like your writing skill
I've been using the site for interest on hodling 15 BTC, and the parimutuel sportsbetting.  I just read the last 30 pages of this thread and it seems weird that most of the thread is this public flame war between customer service and botters who had their accounts confiscated based on secret evidence.   
I used to be a software engineer Google and another online advertising company in LA and at the latter I was in charge of blocking bots that would click on our ads.  It's hard.  There were lots of false positives and false negatives.  Much respect to the people who do this for a living.  But there has to be a better way of doing it that doesn't spam the thread with flame wars about confiscated accounts.   Maybe you can just preemptively block signups from all the IPs of known proxies/VPNs/datacenters and block signups from duplicate IPs. (modulo the edge case where hundreds of distinct mobile devices often share the same IP -- gotta figure out which IP blocks belong to mobile ISPs that do that).  But anyway if you prevent signups by IP you'll have a lot less work to do for banning bots and probably also reduce the risk of false positives from people who were innocently using an open proxy or whatever.    Another quick and dirty idea is to rate limit free btc claims per /24 or /16 IP block.  Are you guys hiring?