Weird links being built across a whole industry

Right guys hoping I can get some insight and thought I'd ask here

Spent a lot of time in my earlier years learning about marketing online, so i have enough knowledge to know when something doesn't look right but haven't been in that world for a while so a bit out of touch with latest developments

I'm working a day job and got given access to the ahrefs account and had a look at the company site

Found loads of random links being built with really long anchor text and if you click through redirects to a sales page selling links

Others with short links in the anchor text leading to telegram pages also selling links

Thought might be negative SEO of a sort especially when the other sites in the group of companies had the same thing

Then I checked the other sites in the industry, other manufacturers and sellers

Nearly every site has the same pattern with a few variations

Only conclusion that kinda makes sense is it's a black hat way of advertising link building services

Shit links though nearly all no follow from spammy domains with long ass adverts as anchor text mostly

Nearly all these links started being built around the same time, more or less last 3 to 4 months and still coming in daily

Anyone doing this or can shed some light?

Figured this would be the best place to ask

Haven't got the list of places as I'm home now but was something like

SEO express, SEO anomaly, dark side links

And a few others.

These links are there solely to show up in backlink reports to get webmasters or website owners curious about what they are and where they come from, so they click through and are presented with a sales page. Pretty much any website with an ounce of traffic will receive them, if not every domain with an html presence. AFAIK they block Googlebot so they're not even crawled by Google, just Ahrefs et al.

Thanks my guy, makes sense I'll ignore and get on with sorting out their SEO