It's comparing Honey's behavior to a well-known and comprehended scandal. Simile is a tried and tested way (hah!) to explain otherwise potentially hard to understand or dry content.
It's not about the severity of the impact, its the fact that they were breaking the rules and explicitly coding to actively avoid being caught by testers.
Thanks for your contribution to this Ben - I was quite stunned by Megalag's finding, and I agree with you that it could definitely be characterized as wire fraud.
I think the very interesting wrinkle here is that, for the most part, their victims are corporations - meaning, sadly, that it's much more likely they will be prosecuted, either in civil or criminal court.
Refusing service (and showing a fake status screen) is in the same ballpark, but dieselgate is a much closer match. They couldn't avoid being put under test, so they had separate behavior based on whether heuristics said it was in a testing environment.
It's not about the severity of the impact, its the fact that they were breaking the rules and explicitly coding to actively avoid being caught by testers.