If by offender you mean the bot, then I'm confused. The bot asked for robots.txt in a plaintext format. The bot was delivered some binary garbage that it couldn

If by offender you mean the bot, then I'm confused. The bot asked for robots.txt in a plaintext format. The bot was delivered some binary garbage that it couldn't parse. The bot continued to ask for an updated robots.txt, and continued to be told that the binary garbage was the intended content. What more was it supposed to do, exactly? The offending party here is the broken hosting platform.