First, thanking for not outing the domain name. It's lesson for newbies that we can discuss something without ruining people hard work.
Second, as this is first time I see such respectful thread, I will shed thoughts on it. Although, It won't make it any easier to accomplish, but a food for thoughts.
There is only one question which answer can open up a lot of possibilities. Which is, does 301 redirects path penalties?
Imagine if you have multiple spammed to death domains, those domains who each expired domain seller avoid like a plague, they sell for cheap and contain millions of spammed links. And just like PLA sites, you generate tens of thousands of pages and upload them at once. Then start redirecting those millions of links to those thousands of pages. It only makes sense that for google crawler, you need to crawl something first, give it pagerank before the spam detectors analyze it and give it spam score.
For indexing crawler, he sees and authority website with thousands of unique pages and millions of backlinks passing juice for it. So, it is like a goldmine and starts indexing and ranking this sh*** like crazy. As it gains ranking comes the spam investigation and find how rubbish it's and kills it. But like all of you already said, it has already made a good return on investment.
Then, you have multiple websites (full network) with thousands of pages having millions of backlinks, indexed and linking to each other. This is like nuclear force shooting the websites to the moon and destroying all on its way. It will rank for weird keywords, but it will gain good traffic.
Now, come the cloaking part which is easy but can't talk much about it because will cause damage than good.
Does this make it any easier to pull, I don't think so as it needs multiple skills to achieve. But it shows that spamming is very well and alive. Makes you cry about all people having hard time indexing their 2000 handwritten articles
