...thanks for posting this. It's food for thought. I'm an active fan and fic writer, and I'm also doing my Phd on fanfic and fan communities. Obviously, by and large, I think fandom is awesome. I love it. I love that there are communities which operate succesfully on an ethos of goodwill and sharing - gift cultures which don't depend on the exchange of money. But stuff likes this reminds me not to over-generalize or idealize (which as someone working for the better appreciation of fandom in academia, it's always tempting to do). Every community, I think, has faultlines, failures in communications, conflicts of value.
If I found someone had done this in one of my fic communities, I would be upset and hurt as many have said, by the manipulative aspect. But I guess its an example of people having different expectations of a community, different ideas of what participation in it means to them, which when you have an online community that has basically an open-door policy, is going to happen at some point.