There's always a choice, but in this case... They chose WRONG. Their strategy most likely wouldnt even work if they didnt get caught. lots of exact match anchor text links around content that is completely irrelevant at the bottom of a blog post, without social sharing matching their backlink profile. (yes, search engines can look at your social sharing pattern with your backlinks and see if something is getting artificial backlinks.)

They chose the short long way... They should have chosen the long short way.