Someone must've figured out a way to make money from this idiocy, or they wouldn't be doing it.

I think that to myself whenever I see a business doing something stupid...

Lots of the cloud providers have free usage tiers, where you don't pay if you don't get many visitors. Maybe if you go out and clone enough websites, you get just enough people who occasionally mis-type a URL and land on your page, and then occasionally click on one of your ads, to make just enough money to justify the time you spent making an automated website cloning tool.... Or maybe once they've got an armada of fake websites up and running, they can auction them off to nasty people who want to distribute malware?

Ive at least ended up clicking on such clone sites while searching for some topic if I dont quite find what I want in the first search results - Ill then look at the later ones, and some might just be duplicated of the first site except on a sketchy site so Ill just look "link not marked as visited *check* relevant keywords *check*" - If its a clone of some of the first search results, I might have visited a few other ones and maybe got distracted doing something else on the way so I wont necessarily realize its the same thing just looking at the google search result.

Maybe the site will catch such people who didnt find what they were looking for and see it as another relevant page.