Note that the article specifies that these cartels mostly feature participants from bad universities in countries that have really whacked-out academic reward mechanisms that arose because some powerful central government force that doesn't understand research productivity came up with a dumb way to incentivize it.

Prestige is not a failsafe guarantor of quality, but it kind of is, in the sense that somebody with a reputation to protect is going to be more careful about coming across as "unserious", and doing stuff like this is a good way to get a bad reputation quickly.