Officially, FDev is very much against it...how much they enforce their rules in practice is anyone's guess.
The ability for players to have multiple accounts (an overtly pay-to-win situation) is a huge force multiplier and can be used with or without bots.
Lets say for arguments sake that there is a bot problem.....
1. How does one employ bots
2. What can they do
3. Do you have links to sites where one can obtain said bots
I am just interested is all
No one is going to link any botting sites as that is explicitly against the forum rules.
That said, in general terms, a bot emulates inputs based on simple feed back mechanisms to automate the operation of a ship beyond what would be practical otherwise. The goal is to reduce the player work required to iterate influence generating transactions, preferably to near zero.
Since accounts are cheap and all the in-game progression mechanisms broken, one person can easily build a fleet of CMDRs with high-end gear and operate them all simultaneously. It doesn't take take anything particularly fancy to automate simple A to B missions, especially since almost everything except launch and initiating the the jump to the destination already has in-game automation tools. Bots that are far less complex than what I've seen in other MMOs could run these missions with essentially no player input at all and all the player would have to do is check on them from time to time to rebuy ships that were occasionally exploded (probably due to some scripting error that ran them out of fuel after an interdiction or missed drop out...non-optional NPC encounters are impotent, even against unattended ships) or refill credit reserves with a couple of shared wing missions.
The problem is you have no evidence to convince anyone, zero, zip, zilch. Why should FDEV take any notice of you if you can't produce evidence, the answer is they won't.
FDev should have a much better grasp of what's going on than any player analysis would be capable of providing. The problem isn't that they don't know, it's that they don't provide any assurances that they are enforcing their rules. I know that other forms of prohibited behavior go unpunished or result in slaps on the wrist that do little to discourage future abuse and in the absence of some convincing statement from FDev, I have to assume that botting is rampant, because the tools for it are readily available and a large subset of players aren't going to have any qualms about violating rules that are not enforced.
Even if no botting is occurring in the scenario the OP is referencing, the OP's faction may very well be driven to bot themselves on the assumption that their opponents are doing so. If the OP then gets away with this (they absolutely should not, but very well may), their presumptions would be validated and they'd then be playing by a superior set of rules, available only to cheaters, which would inspire others to cheat.
I’d be interested to know what ways if any player groups have to identify bot activity, they’re much larger and more experienced than us so I have no reason to doubt their words but as has been pointed out here, how can you be sure?
You can't be sure about any given occurrence. You can be sure that bots exist and are used, but there is no way to tell, from anything players have access to, if automation is being used or if someone just has a lot of accounts and some extra time on their hands.