I lol'd. Sometimes when I read these kind of stories, including phishing and hacking ones, there's this tiny inner evil in me that wants to do bad things, but then I remember consequences and that being good usually pays off.
The Imp of the Perverse, of course.
Some very sketchy back of a napkin in my head math says that my fake email job[1] amounts to pulling off multiple boat heists every year without the intervention of the authorities (whether legitimate or—more problematic—illegitimate). I'm getting away with a lot here.
In a broader sense, they can be considered as hackers.
Making business harder for tourists and renting places is neither cool nor "hacking".
What? Don't some computer hackers also make business harder for regular users? Maybe you have a very different definition of hacker.
It just means maybe there is a market for boat rental pen-testing and security consultancies. There are probably lots of similar vulns in the rental business's process, which can be demonstrated by white hats and corrected. In this case, it was the business incorrectly trusting the thieves' story and foolishly delivering a product they had no way to repossess.