For the record and any other readers, I am still ambivalent towards the practice of vote selling even with some ethical controls.
I don't necessarily agree with the "someone else is going to do unethical thing worse than me so I might as well be the one to do and profit from doing x thing in a less impactful way" position.
But I understand why people are were this way considering the highly competitive nature of the platform and the prevailing culture at the time. It was awful.
Only a handful of bid botters worked with us abuse fighters and I will commend that Marky was one of them.