Yep - not uncommon for spammers to create powerful link networks by buying up a bunch of quality domains, and then spamming links at what they want to rank for.

It normally takes Google a few weeks/months to catch this stuff, so for super competitive terms, it's easy to make it worthwhile by ranking for something like "fast payday loans." Then when the domain gets penalized, rinse/repeating.

Someone teased Matt Cutts with this a while back:

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-payday-loan-cutts-16940.h...