This is the group of accounts, that I refer to as the "satellite ring", and which I reported to 888 Poker in their support thread some weeks ago. As you say, their "trick" is to make late registration close prematurely, so that the satellite run with a big overlay. That obviously require collusion either by the partipicating players agreeing to move all in with random hands and then later share their profit. Or by someone controlling all the accounts themselfes, so they dont care, which account win or lose.
This has nothing to do with botting however. A bot is a computer program playing poker. But if people can get away with multiaccounting, that obviously also open the door for them to let bots play from their many accounts, and to let the bots collude on for instance cash tables. So its certainly possible, that this ring of accounts could be involved in that kind of cheating as well, or that someone else could be running a bot ring.
For the record you have shared the same hand twice, but its still pretty obvious for me, what happened. Apparently they failed to notice, that 7 players had entered rather than 6, and thats why it took 2 hands to make late registration close. Normally they do it in just one hand, where 3 players move all in, and then 2 of them bust. As you say, this is also advantageous for the other players in the satellite. Except for the fact, that they then have to play against a "team", who have no incentive to bust each other, and who can also share information about hole cards.
Even so last time I played with them, I actually managed to win a ticket. What happened was, another player woke up with KK in the first hand, so he won a 4-way all in and busted all 3 colluding accounts. One of them then rebought, but since they both had only the starting stack, I was actually able to outlast both of them, so that they won none of the two tickets. The player with KK won one ticket, and I won the other one.
It was however rather obvious, that they colluded against me. They never played a hand against each other, and they never played against the chip leader either, basically hoping for me to bust against the chip leader, so that they had secured one of the tickets. And of course collusion is not acceptable, so I hope, 888 Poker will take action against this group of accounts soon, and also take steps to make multiaccounting more difficult.