Though it happened anyways, indirectly, at times. That's one of the complaints of the Puritans. In the Church of England at the time, it wasn't too rare that you got into the clergy because you were looking for a cushy job and did favors for the king (fortunately this is less of a problem than in the past, with greater separation of Church and State).
Actually simony was a major problem in the Church of England until the 19th century, with benefices being bought and sold as recently as the 18th century, and also ecclesiastical obligations being attached to some real estate to this day. In the 18th and 19th century, legislative reforms were initiated, but it was not until the 19th century the problem was resolved, and this was a legitimate complaint on the part of the Puritans, and the Roman Catholics alike, in that after the dissolution of the monasteries, which had a disastrous effect on social services in England and Wales, since all hospitals until that time were operated by the religious orders, who did a very good job, unlike the Royal Hospitals that followed, under whose tenure most hospitals such as the Savoy Hospital fell into ruin, and others, such as Bethlehem Hospital, became synonymous with depravity (“Bedlam” being derived from the Cockney pronunciation of Bethlehem). This also happened in Russia when Czar Peter “the Great” as I prefer not to call him sided with the “non-Posessor” faction in the Russian Orthodox Church and laicized a huge amount of church property, closing large numbers of monasteries and church run-hospitals.
Thankfully, nowadays, there are Anglican monasteries and Russian Orthodox hospitals, and in the US the Episcopal Church runs some universities, although not on the scale of the Roman Catholics or Methodists. And simony has of course been eradicated in the Church of England, which is one of the best managed churches in the world when it comes to avoiding various forms of abuse through its comprehensive Safeguarding initiative.
But the Orthodox Church, aside from occasional lapses in the Byzantine Empire and other governments which involved themselves in ecclesiastical affairs which were none of their business, has never had, while functioning autonomously, a major problem with simony, and at present given how poorly most of our clergy are paid the idea is laughable. We have priests making $900/mo or working for free, so if anything, we are guilty of going over to the other extreme in terms of making it impossible for our clergy to make a living as the Apostles said should be the case, and it is a real problem getting cradle Orthodox in some particular churches to donate sufficiently, since they became accustomed to not having to pay for this due to state tithing systems in Europe and due to the ecclesiastical government becoming an ethnarchy under the Millet system of the Ottoman Empire, wherein churches and synagogues became involved in providing courts for Christians and Jews, and the Patriarchs and Chief Rabbis would represent their respective churches and Jewish communities at the Sublime Porte (sometimes unofficially, for example, the Syriac Orthodox, Assyrian Church of the East and Yazidis lacked official recognition, but had ethnarchs, who were not, in the case of the Assyrians and Yazidis, the same person as the hierarchs (the Assyrian ethnarch would be the uncle of the Catholicos-Patriarch of the East, and the Yazidi ethnarch was separate from Baba Sheikh, their religious leader.*
* I was just saddened to learn that Khurto Hajji Ismail, who served as Babba Sheikh during the worst of the Syrian Civil War and provided religious leadership to the Yazidis, who have historically been allies of the Christians and hid Armenians during the genocide in 1915, which is why they were allowed to settle in Armenia and represent the largest ethnic minority in that country, died in 2020 - I had not realized he had reposed as I had been distracted by the pandemic, and after al-Baghdadi was killed and Mosul retaken, I was not following the progress of the Yazidis as closely. They suffered the most severe genocidal act in the war, during the massacre of the adult men of Sinjar and the abduction and sexual enslavement of the women and children, who have since been freed, but much harm was caused. It was a genocidal rape, the worst kind of war crime, and one which has happened all too often in recent years. Likewise, while apparently the Antiochian Orthodox nuns abducted by Al Qaeda in the Syriac speaking village of Maaloula in Syria were unharmed, that was a gross violation, and we know that the terrorists regarded nothing as sacred, given their wanton destruction of icons and other acts of vandalism of the local churches.
