Why is this bot account being rewarded for "great OC?"

A few days ago, I saw a discussion in the comments about repost bots, where someone mentioned that the poster of the post they were commenting on had a suspicious name, which was some string of letters followed by a number. The other person remarked that they were most likely correct, as there was also an account that had the same posting habits and the same string of letters in their username, just followed by the number consecutive (ex. mooo4 and mooo5). That's why this name caught my attention.

Upon opening OP's profile, I find it to have only 4 posts. 2 of the posts hit the front page, and the others were in the negatives. Based on the success rate of 1/2 posts hitting the front page, I assume OP deleted the unsuccessful posts, except for 2 of them, for some reason. The account was also created today.

The account also has no favorites...

...or comnents, promoting more suspicion.

Another thing I noticed was that the posts that fit the criteria of a) being on the front page, b) being from this specific account, and c) had "watch all photo [link]" inserted into the description some amount of time after hitting the front page.

I also noticed that these photos were cropped at the top, where before they had not been. For this post I had not seen the original, but for the post regarding the keychain of someone (presumably not OP, because I am alleging that they are a bot) saying "I love you," I saw it before it was cropped. It appears the timeline for that specific post was hit the front page, insert link into description, and then the photo is cropped, but these did not all happen at once, with a significant amount of time passing between each event on the timeline. Who is cropping these photos? Is it OP or imgur themselves? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

By the way, I had no idea how to tag this. I just put it in the cool section. This isn't very cool, though. :(