RMT brokers only move existing money around in the game. Exploits such as duping and scripting have done all of the damage you see as well as the simple effects of a wide open faucet, a relatively tiny "sink", and plain old time.
The gold that RMTers sell has to be generated somewhere, whether it's scripting/gold farming or both. If they weren't generating it, they wouldn't have it to sell, especially on every shard. It'd be one thing if they were legitimately playing UO and generating the gold in a legitimate manner, but even paying somebody in China and India to farm for gold or items is wrong in my book.
It's not as much of a problem these days, but before Tram and even not long after, the RMTers were a serious problem for legitimate players. Because houses were worth so much, many RMTers were selling houses for cash only. This meant that those houses were effectively removed from the game as far as players buying them for in-game gold, which drove the in-game costs of the remaining houses through the roof. Driving up the in-game costs of remaining housing also helped fuel gold-based RMTs, which further complicated things.
Those kinds of things harm UO a great deal, because it prevents players from competing with one another inside the game, and instead creates situations where you have players competing with other players' real-life bank accounts.
It also didn't help that duping helped and tempted the RMTers. Players had no idea if they were paying somebody who legitimately did what was necessary for the gold in-game or who were duping or engaging in other practices. When you have a lot of money involved, and EA turning a blind eye to RMTs, the temptation was too great.
Noone is "out to get you" (it's bad for business generally), RMT brokers are simply filling a natural niche in a free market economy. As long as people are willing to pay for gold or items, there will be people to sell them.
I agree with this, which is why I'd like to see RMTers and buyers banned. I've always been a fan of EVE Online and the way it's handled RMT - they'll ban the buyers in addition to the RMTers. That does tend to cut down on some of the RMT stuff. They are not always as fast on the bannings of players, RMTers, and scripting accounts as players would like, but they do ban for it.
There was a major RMT website for EVE that was hacked recently, and the information was passed along to some of the EVE news websites as well as EVE's developer, CCP. There are a lot of people sweating bullets over that one, as they might lose their accounts for buying gold and other items. The person who ran the RMT operation had no problem admitting to scripting.
