I use Frobark as well and have seen mixed results. After an initial upward movement on sites I've added, I have noticed a negative trend over time, regardless of the number of keywords used in the spintax or the quality of the link profile of the site when starting the service.
In my opinion the issue is not the quality of the link or ALN itself but rather the fact that these posts get indexed and then fall out of the index a few weeks later. Open up your Frobark report and click on the footprint to see what is indexed - it slowly goes up for a week then over time it drops off. Check some of your submissions from 2 months ago and you'll see that sometimes your original 10 indexed posts drops to 3 (or worse). I think that getting a large amount of links deindexed in this fashion is causes some sort of trust issue.
If you want to play it safe, get 20 solid t1 properties and load them into the account and link to them with related anchor text rather than linking to the money site directly.
I second your thoughts. ALAN is not safe no more.