There's a whole bunch of grey areas in regards to rules.
Editing screenshots is obviously a big no-no, but I see many freaky looking results out there and when you look at some screenies, they have watermarks splashed across them. That in itself is an edit which can easily mask over other edits, or make them look better.
There's rules I don't believe in, like the physx one, which as a consequence I just don't bother with them to any great extent. As much as I would a SuperPI score for example.
Shop owners and reviewers is a massive grey area afaic, mostly when you think of gear they'll bench then be told they can keep to 'give away' to [usually] members of forums etc who're more than likely in the same team. Doesn't bother me in the slightest. I'd be happy, as a receiver of hardware, to pass it on to people to see if they could do better than I could with the kit. But I can see in the hwbot eyes that if one member of the team scores massive points for a component, then hands it around all the members of the group - there-in lies the problem. So fair comment.
I think hwbot rely on respective team captains to use their whip where required. Sounds lenient, but if the captains expect their team to take part in competitions etc, they need to keep their house in order really.