Yes it has.  I wish I still had that picture of what looked to be a bounty hunter/sig campaign farm, which was a shot of a bunchof people with laptops sitting around a table with the forum pulled up on them.  It was PMed to me by some member a while back and I'd posted it in a thread that I've long forgotten.

Anyway, there could be one person behind the accounts or there could be several--who knows?  But even if there were more than one, it's basically an account farm, and higher-ranked accounts are worth money because they can be used to earn more in signature campaigns.  If the account has positive trust or a generally positive reputation, that can be dangerous if sold to a scammer.  What you have to realize is that bounties and sig campaigns are pretty lucrative with bitcoin being as high as it is, so I don't doubt that someone could spend all day "working" to rank up their alt accounts.

Also, this is not an attack on new members in general.  But when alt farms are busted, they're usually when the accounts are at the Jr. Member-Member rank, and that should make sense.  Truthfully, I have no idea how many of the accounts Ratimov listed are connected, because there's no hard proof, i.e., blockchain linkage, between all of them--but I'm nearly certain that the accounts with similar usernames, registration dates, and posting habits are linked.  And since I'm never going to know for sure, barring a complete confession, I'm going to have to be satisfied with the evidence presented and my own gut feeling and experience, and I'm going to ignore those members I think are part of the alt farm.

You're relatively new here, KingsDen.  If you stick around long enough you'll see all sorts of shenanigans like this.