About the "punishment" according to using this bug...i might have a echelon to compare with.
Few years ago, at a seafight birthday event you were receiving a small reward for your login : 3.000 pearls and 5.000 confetti, or something like that...and the bug was that everytime when you were logging in, you had to select your server, (it wasn't like nowadays to place you into the last server you activated immediately after instering your name and password) and there you had a "play" button, everytime that "play" button was pressed, you were receiving that reward...
The catch is that i shared it with my entire alliance, even told to the enemyes about it, i knew that the fewer we are, the worse the punishment will be...and we didnt do manual clicks, we put auto-clicker to do what it was meant to do xD
Minimum amount i know about the persons from my alliance of pearls & confetti that was earned was about 1,5mil pearls and 8mil confetti or so, and that was an unlucky one.
Because we were many, an entire server, they couldnt have severe punishments, otherwise the whole server was dead..what they did was only to take their pearls back, whoever consumed them was receiving them with negative value ( for example you make 1.000.000 pearls from the bug, you consume 800.000 and remain on your ship with the rest of 200.000, when bigpoint takes their pearls back, they take 1.000.000, so your +200.000 pearls from your ship are reduced to 0, and the rest of the amount untill they recover the entire number was inserted with negative value : -800.000 ).
Also the confetti was taken away, and they leave it like that, they didnt put negative values or anything like that for confetti.
My personal advice : share this bug with absolutely everybody, the more you are, the smaller the punishment will be.
MOST IMPORTANT: Due to the high number of persons that used that bug with pearls & confetti nobody was banned, the "payback" from BP was already severe, if they would ban people also, the game was dead 2 years ago and now we would see 1 player in every map at a rush hour :)