By going through some of these accounts you can start to see a pattern. I've just taken a glimpse at this guy https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=552858
And you can see that he's taken a liking to this account: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1159197

Today at 01:50:53 PM: 5 from chineseprancing for Re: China calling for a wider ban on Crypto currency trading ?
February 05, 2018, 12:36:44 PM: 5 from chineseprancing for Re: Merit & new rank requirements

It may seem like a casual 5 points here and 5 points there, but note that chineseprancing has been awarding merits only twice in his account history. He logged in on the 5th and first merit he awarded was 5 to dhas, then he went offline and came back 10 days later to again give 5 merit to dhas. Sure, we can say that this was a completely random act, and I'm not going to condemn anyone but sometimes it's obvious when people are trying to feed other accounts with merit either because those are their friends or their alts.