All my friends have been telling me how the ban rate for real-world trading has recently gone up severely, i haven't played in over 6 months so i was wondering if there is any truth to that?

For buying gold not really. For selling gold yes, but it's easy to get around it once you figure out how.

Still laughably low. I don't think there's a good way to distinguish between gold sellers and legitimate trades without a ton of false positives. At this point hundreds of mills are trading hands at any given time. As for what you're friends said, they're referring to jamflex DMCAing Arcus/Bogla's site which makes hardly an impact at all. They have the right idea (going after major gold sites), but their execution is poor. They can't do it properly in-game so they're taking it to real life. Everyone's tipped off and taking extra precautions now, but for the most part they are not necessary.

na it's low if ur not stupid