Played against a rank 3350 player today. They were not good, were middle of the scoreboard and went 20-15 on console. My only guess is that that bought the account from someone that used some downloaded ability to rank it up and sell it.
Buying accounts, gear, weapons, paying for leveled up accounts has been around since the beginning of online gaming.
I have bought gear for Diablo 2 in the early 2000s. I farmed for a perfect windforce bow for 4 years in that game. Eventually i gave in and paid 15 dollars for one on ebay.I have bought accounts for World of Warcraft when I was deployed. Its nothing new.
I even sold armor on Diablo 2 for 1500 bucks on ebay back in the day.
Its always been here and wont go away any time soon.
There are farmed accounts for sure. I played when the game was first released and some player was already ranked over 150, so I checked their account and their playtime was in the hundreds of hours. It had been running almost 20+ hours a day on average to achieve the score and rank the "player" had, so it was 100% being tag-teamed by multiple individuals to rank up fast.
Yeah they've unfortunately been around for a while in various forms. As you suspect, a lot of them will be phishing traps for account takeovers.
Watched a video recently of someone discussing battlefield and, in his video, talked about an account boosting site, which apparently, you pay them and give them your login credentials to level up your account. That's crazy! I never knew junk like this even existed until seeing that video. Guy in video said it was 100% legit to do, but I certainly wouldn't think so.
Potentially, I've seen people selling modified accounts in the past for other games, but I think that it's more likely that they just spent a lot of time in AFK XP farming lobbies, like TTZ_Dipsy says.
If you're suspicious about them and can remember their details, there isn't any harm in reporting them to ToS: How to report cheating, harassment, and illegal content
There are weird lobbies people use to level up fast, I assume to get the battle pass out of the way; I wouldn't recommend using them though as you might get banned for exploitation
