[seiji]

The comments here have covered all the shady/illegal aspects of the post, but the most dangerous part (and you may not experience it in person outside of major tech areas): people get really excited about manipulating and abusing others for their own gain (especially small numbers of technically competent people abusing large numbers of "normals").

People are just anonymous hits online, right? Drive up the hits. How? Just manipulate people. Oh, we got money? Chest bumps and high fives all around. We did it!

When you start thinking about "right" or "wrong" when doing work like this, your world falls apart, so you don't think that way. You run the hustle. You run the borderline-illegal practices all in the name of growth. When you're successful it'll all be forgiven by rich people who want to leech of your success anyway.

If we keep telling ourselves it's bad/wrong/illegal, all the people willing to do this shady work will end up ruling the world while we still sit on our poor sanctimonious asses.