As i am reading comments in the forum, i saw an account with 3 activities and a 100+ merits. Im curious how he/she get that. I dont know if he/she had a backer or what. Is merit can be manipulated? Im not saying that he/she manipulated it but i dont know just my instinct.
Did you look at his/her posts? You should've done that first before thinking that way. There is also someone that I know in the forum which is still a member but he has merits over 500+ if I'm correct and I must say, he deserves those merits.
Merits can be manipulated in a way where you have an Alt account that is high-ranking, you can give merits to your other accounts. That's called merit farming but a lot of those users are getting banned because it's unethical to do such things.