Anyone think this is a legitimate request?

[Legolas]

As far as I can see, the links here don't have rel=nofollow attribute, so putting a link here is (was) a good way to get higher rank on google. Maybe this company put here a fake user to get a "follow" backlink. Now google penalizes the webpages with a large number of backlincks from sites that aren't closely related, so this company is trying to remove them to recover from the google penalization

[AthenaOfDelphi]

As far as I can see, the links here don't have rel=nofollow attribute, so putting a link here is (was) a good way to get higher rank on google. Maybe this company put here a fake user to get a "follow" backlink. Now google penalizes the webpages with a large number of backlincks from sites that aren't closely related, so this company is trying to remove them to recover from the google penalization

That is exactly my view... they paid to get backlinks.

Anyhow, the link is already gone, it was one of the spammy users I cleaned out while transferring the site