Google Bowling - Building bad backlinks you need to build to harm a competitor's website. Google started penalizing sites that purchase site-wide text link ads to get lots of incoming links in a hurry. Unscrupulous webmasters realized that this could be used against competitor sites by linking to them instead of their own site.
When it is started?
Since, Google started to use link popularity as a ranking factor, certain unscrupulous entities began buying site-wide links for competitor sites, thus causing them to incur the Google penalty.
Can you be harmed by Google Bowling?
Google Bowling is a form of Black-hat SEO. If spam can harm your ranking then creating spamming links to your site can harm your SERPS. If someone leaves a comment on a site with a link, they can use your website URL for spamming on various sites like : Forum, Blogs and Social Network. It gets reported and Google may flag your site.