I discovered this yesterday and blogged about it here DMOZ Deal if you are interested in this sort of sleeze - Michael
Not knowing what the urls are, there really isn't much that could be commented on. As far as $1500 for three listings in a directory of free listings goes: I have ocean front property in Indiana that I will sell cheap Seriously though, if the sites aren't listable in the first place then even if a corrupt editor listed were to list them they would be removed and any fool who would pay $1500 to someone to speed up listing listable sites is just plain crazy. My guess is exactly what you said I think you nailed it. And thanks for the link to the dmoz abuse report thread in the blog!
that's pretty expensive for a free directory...but it may be worthed in the long run...if they don't get deleted
Quite amusing that the two listed bidders netsmartz.com and qbitsystems.com -- can't even get their own URLs listed in DMOZ. (Though a quick glance at qbits' sites, seems it was written by some kind of text generating robot - so they probably have no clue about what DMOZ is anyway)