SPAM Honey Pot?

I have received a few emails of this sort recently.
Do you think they are legit?
Is someone really link-building this way in this day and age?
Is it just a plot to ensnare people in some sort of link buying scheme and then reveal it to Google?

Since I don't want to link to these sites from my blog, I'll just put a picture of it here....

spam link buying request

Firefox link checker says my links are forbidden!

I just installed the firefox link checker and ran it on my sitemap. It didn't seem to give much in the way of results. Then, I pulled down the menus: tools - web developer - information - display title attributes.

Yikes! I got a mess of "Title=forwarded or forbidden link" messages. But the links look fine to me. Anybody understand such things?