I think this probably counts as an iceberg-scale problem. It's like taxes; avoiding them by gaming the system in every way you can find is unethical but not illegal. Actively deceiving people (with fake updates to the app) and collecting and acting upon PII to screen out public officials is getting into criminal conspiracy territory.

I'm extremely surprised their lawyers signed off on it. Maybe they're libertarians though, I've heard some really odd arguments that turned out to be predicated on various 'natural law' theories.