How to verify or understand what appears to be backlink farming.

I recently started engagement reporting as a content strategist for a portion of a major financial services website. It is essentially a top of funnel blog for one LOB. One article has historically had a crazy high traffic in comparison to all the other articles (like 3-4x more) and it's a topic that doesn't seem to warrant the interest. The semantic context of the page is all over the place too. The owner of this portion of site is not very bright and says this page has been a mystery for over 5 years (and her contracted SEO company has been employed for over 17 years). I've used a few freebie tools to see the backlinks and each shows that there is a high number of links from what are obvious link farms in India, etc., but the data is seriously truncated on the free versions. I've followed some of the links and seen blog articles on Indian sites that are all about this US-only company with services for US-only residents. So someone must be paying for these low quality links, right? The company or the SEO agency? Both seem to have a high tolerance for data reporting that signifies nothing. The blog articles I've seen are highly relevant but from inane websites in the developing world. The main domain has 50% toxic score for DA, so the tolerance for low quality seems pervasive.