Though they made him a mod?
If someone comes to us and admits that they were socking and apologizes and asks forgiveness and such, and they weren’t being malicious while socking,etc. we’re usually pretty forgiving about it (this is nothing new).
If we find you first, it’s usually an insta-ban.
Confession is good for the soul.
You’re banning geeks now?
It’s gonna get real quiet around here…
It does seem like socking is the most common reason for banning (any statistics about this?) which makes me wonder why that is so frequent (haven’t read the rules?) and why the perpetrators think they can get away with it (haven’t read the rules?).
…rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers, and Methodists!
At least there are no Irish.
By far the most common bannees are spammers. The vast majority of socks that are banned are previously banned posters trying to sneak back in, mostly trolls. They obviously are aware of the rules.
…anymore!
Aw, prairie shit… Ban Everybody!
It’s been done.
And of course, the existence of sock puppets means that the percentage of users who have been banned is not the same as the percentage of usernames who have been banned. When the mods clean up twenty-six socks in the span of a single hour (yes, it’s happened, one for every letter of the alphabet), that’s not twenty-six people being banned; it’s just one. As, for that matter, were the few hundred in the days immediately before and after that.
This one time, at banned camp… 
There are a handful of mostly mentally ill posters who together account for thousands of socks, often banned within a matter of minutes. Obviously the probability of getting caught doesn’t matter to them.
I’m a dimwitted Mexican bandit . . .
I hope nobody notices.
What a n00b! 
I’ll just de-lurk to comment that it’s funny the OP is a '99er and didn’t know the answer already.
What I often wonder about is the users who sign up, participate in multiple threads for several days or a few weeks (thus, neither brand-new users nor long-time users) who are suddenly banned, without any notice in ATMB about it, and with no troublesome posts or warnings (that I can find anyway), and then suddenly they are banned. What brings that about?
The only explanation I can think of is that they must be socks who somehow didn’t caught right away, but then got discovered later. Is that typically the case?
For the situation you have described, it is nearly always the case.
Through the Vatican?