Indeed. Who cheated this merit giveaway, should be reported and excluded from participation.
IIRC when @Daniel91 started two merit giveaway threads in this board (i also merited some of the applicants) the participation percentage was very low, only a fistful of newbies were interested in submitting links to their good posts.
And in this giveaway also, it's the same case. Imo, no one is going to cheat, cheating isn't the problem, as you can see for yourself just how many Jr members-newbies have participated thus far. @op, since you want to give out 25 merits, and you've sent out 12, you can go to other threads/topics; you will see quality posts to merit.
Yes, unfortunately I can confirm that.
When I closed that topic I immediately got 2 private messages from a newbies asking me to give them a merits.
So, on the one hand you want to help but on the other hand the quality of the posts is low and the number of registrations is usually always too small.
And as a finale, they still bother you with private messages on the forum.