From Google Blog Team

“If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank violates our webmaster guidelines.”

Tell us something we don’t know already.

Also, as I thought,  PR seemed to have dropped accross the entire seo niche. Why? Well that’s probably where most of the paid-for-links originated from. Take out a couple of big “hot sites” and you have a cascade down to us bottom feeders.