Once upon a time there was a clever
SEO specialist who found a way of misleading Google without being blacklisted for cloaking. He used it on all his sites, and for a while he enjoyed great success. Other people picked up his method, and copied what he was doing. Pretty soon Google noticed what was going on, and blacklisted the whole lot of them...
IMO it's not what works now that you need to worry about. In the future, Google will enforce it's policy in whatever way it deems necessary to maintain the integrity of its results.