Well, it would work for a while since I doubt the owner of the fake site is actively monitoring it. He probably has a bunch of similar scraped sites running on

Well, it would work for a while since I doubt the owner of the fake site is actively monitoring it. He probably has a bunch of similar scraped sites running on autopilot. Even when(if?) he notices it, he'd have to change the operation of the bot to rewrite the links. At that point the SEO would be quite damaged by the canonical tags. If the canonical tags were added stealthily he probably wouldn't notice at all until his SEO was completely destroyed.