This is 100% not effective anymore. This is just a slightly more malicious version of the the spam bots that post back links in wordpress comments, except in this case they were adding entire html pages to the sites. This is a violation of Google's duplicate content rules and if anything would be viewed negatively by Google.
The efficacy of this hack is nil as the "money domains" that were profiting from these backlinks had little domain authority or relevant traffic according to the author's article.
The only only way that linking strategies are viable anymore are gaining links from domains with authority or huge numbers of links.
Maybe if the hacker would have created tens of thousands of back links from vulnerable fashion blogs (same category of site as the money sites) they would've gotten some SEO juice.