Is Lycos the most cynical engine in existence?

We've recently started receiving quite aggressive telesales calls from the Lycos UK office, selling us "top" keywords giving us banner space at the top results pages.

We've always ranked very high with them in the past, although they never delivered any quality traffic. Thus we politely refused their £495 banner offer on the basis that they've never produced much - why would we pay for the privelege now?

Just had another call for another one of our sites and again, politely refused. Then I went to check our current listings...

WE'VE DISAPPEARED!!! We have been completely removed from their index, in fact a search for the site name just brings up all the (many) partners who link to us.

It would appear that by refusing their paid advertising, we've been totally penalised. Has anyone else suffered this? And if it's true, can Lycos truly be called a search engine?

Surely the most cynical approach to paid placement EVER... Comments welcome...