Tell me please who those noname users generously receiving merits?
I think it's partially caused by notification bots: posting a list of usernames means some of them get notified. If they get notified, they see the post. If they see the post, it increases the chance of getting Merited.
As a Merit source, 1 sMerit more or less is a drop in a bucket.
So this is not the whole list of these farms.
Look not at the number of merits gived to each user, but at the total number of these fake noname users