Aren't you aware that merits can be sold?  And if not merits, then at the very least an account that has sMerits or a higher rank than Jr. Member can be sold for a decent price (though I'm not up to date on how the account-selling market is these days).  My point is that merits are valuable, whether it's monetary or not.  That's why Theymos doesn't accept every merit source application that comes to his attention; you have to be trusted enough not to abuse the system.

And there have been account farmers with way more accounts than 60+ (if I'm not mistaken), though it's been some time since a ring this big has been busted.  That's because the merit system makes it very hard to rank up multiple accounts, because an account farmer has to produce posts well above average to catch the attention of members with merits to give--and that would explain why there was plagiarism involved in this case, though some of the accounts did exhibit decent writing skills aside from that. 

You can be surprised at this as long as you like, but this shit used to happen a lot back when all it took to climb the ranks was activity and time.