I fully expected this to happen when they released Empyreum. So about two weeks before housing dropped, we were informed that bidding FC members had to be 30 days old with the FC. So while that meant that the first lottery was mostly legit FCs, every lottery after that would be littered with shell FCs that did the grinding necessary to level multiple shell FCs to the proper rank to buy up other houses in the wards. This was all made possible by the fact that SE set the bar too low for FCs to buy coupled with SE allowed the first 18 wards to be FC only when these wards were released.