No no, this is very common. At one time, i stole a variety of subs from people. Go to r/redditrequest and read their rules. They have a whole song and dance they go through. In summary, they set this up so that people can step in and take-over unmoderated subs or abandoned subs.
Unfortunately for them, a lot of it is automated so it is very easy to exploit. You put in a request for a particular subreddit and their systems will mass mail all the mods of that sub and basically say "Hey, if you are not unmoderated, come to this thread and argue against this person's accusation." If, after a certain period of time (A week to two weeks) they don't hear back from anyone, then it wipes all the mods from the sub and puts the requested up as the head moderator.
The exploit I used is simple, but also simple to thwart. Here is the process...
1) Identify a sub that has only one moderator or only one active moderator. (It doesn't matter how many they actually have, you just want a moderation team that will not check its mail in the next two weeks)
2) Remove the only active moderator. You can do this by (A) Waiting until he goes out of town. (B) Overwhelming admins with complaints about how allows things that violate TOS on the sub. Or (C) Make an accusation of child porn to the correct admins, thereby prompting an extended investigation as he is temporarily suspended and someone on the admin team is tasked with going over every DM he has ever sent to see if there is any evidence of this.
3) Put in a sub request the MOMENT he is suspended. The timing on this has to be perfect. If you wait too long then he could return from suspension in time to stop it.
And now here is the way you thwart it: Many accounts, many moderators. It only takes a single moderator to respond to the DM, show up at the reddit request thread and say "No, actually, it is not abandoned. I am a mod."
The problem with a lot of head moderators is that they have a nasty habit of consolidating power and then deciding not to share it with anyone. On top of this, when they get suspended, they have no idea what is about to happen so they get the idea that all they have to do is hang out and wait for their suspension to end and everything will be fine. They are oblivious to the fact that their sub is being stolen and even if they knew... there is nothing they can do about it because they are forbidden from responding to DMs or making a thread comment.
This is why, on all the more established subs, you will not only see handfuls of 'junior mods' but also a massive list of hidden mods. These are accounts that were given moderator status but do not show up on the public mod list. These are typically backup accounts so that if anything ever happened, the head moderator could proxy in to the backup account and continue moderating the sub despite the suspension.
Hope this helps.
