What an entertaining soap opera -- All My Sockpuppets!
The edit war at Wikipedia is fascinating.
Unfortunately, the underlying story appears to be all too true. I would think that if Ectaco had an innocent explanation for all of this, they would have written the administrators at MR by now. They haven't. So I have to assume the accusations are true. The IP addresses are solid evidence.
I expect many companies will do some surreptitious promoting of their products on forums, but to perpetuate such a long-term systematic fraud the way Ectaco did is extremely shoddy. I will never buy one of their products -- not that I ever had any interest in an Ectaco product to begin with. But it just shows the type of deeply dishonest people they are.
I want to thank MR user Gamba66 for his gumshoe work and uncovering of the fraud. Kudos to you!
--Pat