Yeah, this is just capitalism in action. Almost every startup has stories like this, which appears to be why YC's startup school shies away from "goody two-shoes" type people and has questions like "please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system".

For example, in the early days Amazon famously "leveraged" the purchase of out of print books from their wholesalers to obtain orders that would otherwise be too small to ship.

That's just how capitalism works. You have to be either too small to bother with or too big to fail -- the problem area is in the middle.