Any evidence of this? $200 seems quite a little amount, and they could be just rogue admins.
One of my friends, an user with tens of thousands of Wiki edits found a Job description in Elance.com. It was to alter the Wikipedia article of a Mining company. The person who posted the job was a total idiot and he made all the details public (visible to everyone). My friend took a screenshot of this job, and marked the article in his watch list. To his surprise, the job was carried out within the next 48 hours, by a very reputed admin. My friend posted this in the Wikipedia complaints thread, along with the proof. Initially, the majority of the admins voted in favor to ban the culprit. But then suddenly 2-3 British admins, who are close to Wales argued that the proof was doctored.
The JPEG file had no modifications, but these guys will not believe. And the new edits were clearly biased in nature, deleting the sections on environmental damages caused by the company and replacing it with an alternate version from a little-known source. The argument went on for 2-3 months, and my friend gave it up (He had a full time job as well).
A few days later, the British admins flagged my friend's user account as "Sockpuppet". They claimed that he was holding 2-3 different accounts, which were only a few days old. Most of the edits were in the articles in which my friend was active. But some of the edits were clearly spam. A Checkuser process was conducted, and it was found that although the IPs were different, the network provider was the same. My friend was banned.
He wrote to Wales, but the latter replied by saying that the people who banned him are the most honest Wiki editors.
