So your logic is: you get caught stealing, you give back the money, no harm done and thus no punishment.

That's a joke. If Werner was his sock puppet account, applying a scammer tag on Garr is the only way to protect users in future auctions created by Garr, or in any business transaction with him. If he gives back the money to starsoccer9 and that's it, what stops him to create more sockpuppets and continue to bid shill more auctions? If no tag is applied, he will still be seen by all users as the trustworthy member that holds money for the forum, etc. In fact, giving the type of character he is depicting of himself, one ready to publicly humiliate himself and give up basic principles to get his miners, while subtly implying he is being forced and blackmailed when the Skype logs contradict this, I would fear that in case  he goes unpunished because of paying back, he would find a way to scam more so he can make up for his" loss".

In any case, I think Garr created a big problem for himself. He has a company (cognitive) that will probably be shaken by the outcome of this.

If Werner was indeed his sockpuppet, I guess Garr will end up learning a very real and important lesson: you cannot be" a little bit" scammer, you are either a scammer or you are not, full stop.  And shill bidding is being a scammer.

In these forums we conduct quite a lot of business transactions. There is a thriving economy. And mods have limited power, because a scammer could create many sockpuppets and connect through proxies or Tor and that is difficult to catch. Thus, we all have to take our own decisions about who we are going to trust, and if that trust is broken by someone everybody needs to see it straight away.