Although Buying/selling bitcointalk accounts was widespread before Merit system, I do not remember that there were cases that successfully sold merit too
many Merits and therefore the black market for them is small and not enough to make changes.


In general, I do not know the benefit of it, as ranking-up to fullmember, hero and above required too many merit, which are impossible to collect by buying them, and the risk is great + joining campaigns does not only require merits.

It may be understandable to anyone who wants bounty campaigns and others that require a member's rank or 10 merits.