VBO calls entity_save after custom action is triggered. How to stop that?
This is an old issue, but I literally just had the same problem and after banging my head off of it all day I found upon a solution through the d.o issue queue. 

https://www.drupal.org/node/2254871

I applied the patch from #42 and it solved it right away after setting 'behavior' =&gt; array().

Hope this helps someone else.