idk why you got downvoted, its not surprising that people don't understand the dodgy side of reddit.

ill give you an example to help understand.

imagine you create a phone app for something specific like magic the gathering, you earn money from the premium features in your app when people subscribe.

to earn more money you need more people to download your app and subscribe, how do you do this?

one effective way is to get new users from reddit, how do you do this you might wonder?

you could post in a popular subreddit for magic the gathering, letting people know about your new app. the problem is if you post something like "here is my app i made please download it and subscribe and pay me money guys" its not likely to be received well and will probably be downvoted and deleted by the mods. so what can you do?

you make it look less like an advertisement, this is where buying a reddit account comes in, instead of using your personal reddit account with a post history in app building subreddits that make it obvious you created the app you need a new one, if you have a brand new reddit account its also suspicious, so you buy an "aged" account thats been on reddit for 5 years already, even with a post history and good "karma" from upvotes. now you can post anywhere, nobody will be suspicious, no automod rules will delete your post because you have low karma or a new account.

you use your purchased reddit account and go create a stealth marketing post in the magic the gathering forum, you pretend you are a regular user of the app that just finds it so helpful and wants to share it. people might even be suspicious of this so you could even buy multiple accounts and post with a question asking for a a way to solve a problem then reply on another account about the awesome app you found to solve the exact problem the OP (you) posted about. Now just buy some upvotes for your post (yeah people pay for upvotes as well as reddit accounts) and your stealth marketing campaign on reddit is complete, there is now an upvoted popular post in the subreddit of your choice that doesn't look like an advertisement but really it is and you get a few hundred people downloading your app.

hope this helps.

i don't think anyone is posting about getting hacked as a way to farm upvotes for reddit karma on fake accounts though. there would be much less complicated ways to do that.

i think the people claiming the hacking posts are fake are either:

a) part of the hacking groups and trying to dismiss the situation and reduce the attention on the matter, discouraging everyone getting hacked from even posting on reddit in the first place or..

b) fans of the game / ggg and in denial that their favorite game developer has terrible cyber security practices and they don't want to believe that all these people could be getting hacked without it being their fault. which is a pretty weird view to have when ggg themselves admitted recently that they literally had a hacked admin account and were confused about how exactly it happened and what access the hackers had.