I have even asked Crypto mania to not merit my posts at one time when there was a lot of accusations and red paint for merit abuse on the forum.
I can't find my PM but this is the answer I got from Crypto mania back then.
If you are real friends on offline with same house then why you have bothered to communicate via forum PM? Is not that you have pre-plan what you should do if you expose?
Later there was a post from Theymos on the forum that there is no red paint for merits so I stopped to be worried about and merited further all good posts.
Had theymos told you to abuse merit with Alts?
Do you think I will be so clever and write almost a year ago PM's about merits to myself and not take care of the same ETH addresses and ref links if this was my alt account?
Possibly, because that time was a wave of tag merit abuser. Or HTML edited although I don't know how to do it.