The simplest thing is probably just to ask for it. I'm sure if you went now and asked to be moderator for a hundred different mid-sized subs, you'd get yes from a few. If you "seem trustworthy", probably more than a few.
Its worth any maintainer to be familiar with these methods to build up defences. With a few sock puppet accounts a single person could do it on their spare time. A nation state or criminal full time enterprise could do several attacks.
It's scary and immoral but I find it fascinating too. Like the dark side of the how to win friends books.
Strangely not mentioned much in here is how these accounts are up for sale.
It's definitely never mentioned on reddit because simply saying one of the websites in an offhand comment gets you a sitewide ban and your comment deleted.
Mods aren't set in stone, they tend to be active for a few years and then give up. Once that happens and you notice the current mods not posting anything for a period of time, you can simply file a request to side-wide admins to take over that sub, as giving it to anyone else is better than leaving it completely unmoderated.
it's surprising that this feature remains relatively unknown. the article doesn't seem to be directly aware of it. I recently requested a fairly important subreddit which had been taken over by mods of a competing to sub and locked down to prevent competition, and they gave it to me immediately
Apart from getting the existing mod team to hand over to you, you can also petition to the reddit admins. For example, there is a process to replace inactive mods and this could be used to take control of a subreddit with existing users.
