What is my competitor doing?

Hi
I have a question that I'm hoping someone can help me with.
One of my competitors is getting loads of backlinks from websites that have decent PR but seem to be completely fake (or outdated sites that have been hijacked for the purposes of creating backlinks). They look like normal sites but if you look further down the page there are lists of backlinks which are completely unrelated to the site. Here's an example:

chinazone org

(sorry - this isn't the best example as it has no pagerank but I can't post url's due to account limitation and most of the better examples have really long url's - I can post other examples if it helps)

It seems like a very dubious way of getting backlinks but he's showing up as the number 1 search result for my chosen keywords so it obviously works. I'd like to copy his tactics but don't know how to. Can anybody let me know how this is done?

Thanks in advance

Maybe they're all his? Or he subscribed for a service like this one

Thanks for the quick reply - I'm pretty sure that they are not all is as there are over 500 links and some are from Uganda, Belgium, Holland etc. The whois records also have other peoples details on, they don't all seem to be owned by one person or company.

Thanks for the link, I'll check it out.

I've looked at the website you suggested and I don't think that they have signed up for this sort of scheme. The reason that I say this is that a lot of the sites that they are getting links from have lists of links on their main page that is clearly nothing to do with the product/service they are promoting on their site. I can't imagine any company wanting a load of crappy looking links on their main page. Does anyone else have any suggestions on how they have got these links?