Q:

Active bounties allow sock puppet gold to be hoarded

Background
As a result of another meta question highlighting suspicions of sockpuppety one user was recently suspended and another 2 were deleted. However, 3 hours before this happened (possibly knowing that the jig was up) the puppet master converted almost all their rep into a bounty. As a result of the 2 puppet's destruction the masters rep was set to 1 (and would have gone very negative if my calculations are correct. I believe to -218).
But the bounty remains. All that the master now needs to do is create a new sock, pick up the bounty of 350 clean rep and repeat the process, gaining 218 rep that we know to be fraudulent.
Question
Is this acceptable? I know that bounties are rarely invalidated once started (at least on on topic questions) but in this case it is enabling fraud. Worse still, if invalidated would this return the 350 rep to the sock master.
Discussions of the bounty were in my original flag which is why I’m bringing this up on meta for discussion (is there even a way for mods to refund the bounty without simply returning the rep to the master)
Update
After the one week suspention the bounty-cached sockpuppet rep was returned to the OP, assuming my reading of the rep change is correct

The times seem a little wrong, when I remember it from the time I remember "Rep Change" and "User was Removed" happening at the same time

A:

This is one of those weird edge-cases that make bounties so... Interesting.
We've cleaned up the mess here; the effects were fairly benign. However, any accounts caught using this to intentionally inflate their reputation will be subject to removal. 

