...
At this point, I was reasonably sure that he was a bot and reported him, but the point is, what if he was not a bot? Is it misbehavior to report as a bot someone and turns he's not a bot? And, is it useful at all to report suspected bots?

After CCP has looked into it and concluded the reported player is/was not a bot, noting will happen.
However, continuous reporting the same person(s) as a bot wile CCP has concluded they are not, can be considered harassment. Since harassing other player is not allowed, that may lead to repercussions for your account.
In short, if you suspect someone to be a bot, report it once and let CCP do their job.
And yes, that is useful. Players reporting a suspected bot is one of the (many) tools CCP uses to catch the real evildoing game breakers.

In your specific case, if you stumble upon the same player again and think by yourself 'Hey! I reported this guy, he's a bot! Why isn't he banned?!?' consider the following: It may have been a legitimate miner ATK who had a real life emergency that forced him to immediately abandon his computer, only to be able to return to it two days later.
Unfortunately those things do happen.

If you have any further questions regarding this, please feel free to ask them in this thread.

that guy was doing nothing, even if he was AFK, well, he wouldn't just leave the ship alone for like an hour,

[quote=Comey Calla]

Or maybe he just fell asleep.....

people

...then I stole his stuff. I had to do it 4 times, as my Venture can't hold all that much ore...

I stole his stuff. I had to do it 4 times, as my Venture can't hold all that much ore (some 60k pyroxeres, which I sold for 3+ million, easy money! ).

In situations like this it is best to steal it all at once the first time. Jettison a can and transfer it all into your can then take from that. This way you don't refresh your suspect counter each time. You just get the initial suspect counter and then it simply bleeds away during the other trips to your home station. You could even wait out the suspect counter after the first trip, then returned with complete immunity to pick up the rest.

I've been doing some hisec mining and today I've come across a pod sitting by a Retriever wreck.

By then I was suspicious, that guy was doing nothing, even if he was AFK, well, he wouldn't just let the ship alone for like an hour, don't? Eventually it will get full.

I did my second shift and returned, then I stole his stuff. I had to do it 4 times, as my Venture can't hold all that much ore (some 60k pyroxeres, which I sold for 3+ million, easy money! ).

In situations like this it is best to steal it all at once the first time. Jettison a can and transfer it all into your can then take from that. This way you don't refresh your suspect counter each time. You just get the initial suspect counter and then it simply bleeds away during the other trips to your home station. You could even wait out the suspect counter after the first trip, then returned with complete immunity to pick up the rest.

In other news... people still jetcan in this day and age? Why oh who would anyone do such a thing? No ore canister should be left in space for longer than it takes the nearest friendly Orca to haul it in.

In fact I would even go so far as to say that this would have looked to me like a case of can baiting. I am surprised that this person's friends did not show up the moment the suspect flag was activated. You were possibly very fortunate in this regard.

But if it was a bot then this would all make sense. I would theorize that not all of the mining bots programs out there have been properly updated in some time and therefore many may still be using old obsolete jetcan coding in their processes. So by all means, steal from them. It is bad enough that they are botting... worse still that they are too lazy to even keep their nefarious programs up to date.