It was a classic I bought about 20 links. But as soon as the webspam action happened I removed them (through text-link-ads.com). I was on top of it and cleaned it up but I have 3 times resubmitted it for re-approval over 1.5 years now with no luck.
I broke the rules but Viagra sites get better treatment.
The problem was that 80% of the customers came from lists given out by courthouses. Customers would type in the web address into Google search instead of the address bar.
Once the website disappeared from the Internet the only way customers could find the site was by Google adwords which went from spending $150 a day to $500 a day. A total win for Google I guess!
It was impossible to spend $500 a day forever, I put the website (the same website, no changes) onto a new domain and now it spends about $200 a day in Google adwords. Much better. I seemed to have received the worst possible webspam action for really very little. Consider other site buy thousands of links.. my 20 links were small potatoes that I thought would fly under the radar.
The whole incident cost about $100,000+ in sales mostly from customers who if they just knew how to use the address bar would have made it to the website.
When I see other websites have issues with Google, I know it doesn't take a whole lot to bring a great deal of Google issues upon them. Google if they wants to can just remove them or send them to page 200 and since Google gets 80% or so of searches and people don't know how to use the address bar the website is going to have to buy Adwords in order to stay online or change domains (assuming it is not an on-page issue).