Is it possible for a competitor to use autobots to submit another competitors backlinks to low quality sites?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Joseph Asamoah: Hi I am investigating some negative SEO and I was wondering if its possible for a competitor to use autobots to submit another competitors backlinks to low quality sites. There has been a huge spike of links for the past month from my data ,after digging i noticed they were basically non related sites,spam sites and most predominantly 404 sites. If it is how do I combat it and what advice can i give?
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  Frank Ludriks: First find out what the anchor text is. Is it related to your site or is it anchor text which may be related to a hack (or possible future hack) on your site?
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  Edwin Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 01:31:14 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/is_it_possible_for_a_competitor_to_use_autobots_to_submit_another_competitors_backlinks_to_low_quality_sites +Joseph Asamoah
  
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  Lori Eldridge:  ;Negative SEO's often use a submission service that is actually a large network of sites so they place an order, push a button and it's all done within a few minutes. If you have a suspect in mind watch their ebay account for purchased links. This happened to a client of mine, but he caught the culprit red handed and reported it to Google so whatever penalty was applied to my client was minimal as Google could those links didn't match the linking pattern for this site. The best way to get rid of those links is use a SEO tool that tags links as unnatural and sets up a disavow file you can submit to google. You should view each one yourself however, and request removal and get lots of them removed  ;or the disavow file may have no effect.
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  Joseph Asamoah: Actually did some more digging up and I have to say it  ;was no negative seo but was actually it was self inflicted.  ;I am doing the work for an escort agency and it just dawn on me that the sites I handle are all clone sites under  ;different domains. I used Copyscape just to make sure and bingo. I am leaning towards a Panda Algorithm which was rampant last month as the main site  ;suffered a fall in traffic for its targeted keywords. That is not to say negative SEO does not exist but the the links to 404 sites,spam ,unrelated content and overuse of rich anchor text was down to a rogue Black Hat agency in India that worked on it previously. Someone makes the mess and you gotta clean up....  ;And if you wondering why they used cloned sites I noticed that the sites link to each other transferring the juice,In one minute you may think its a stroke of genius but then again its folly.I have a report to write that the webmasters will not be happy with lol ;