Regarding the suspicious merit history, there's something really fishy about it and the interval in merits aren't that far and wide and the frequency is following some pattern so either it's most likely someone who has bought merits or in the unlikely circumstances, it's a troll trying to mess with people by doing merit abuse.
Is it one puppeteer controlling
all the accounts involved as part of a ranking up process on his accounts or is it a deal between other farm operators to send/receive merits between themselves in order to build up the accounts involved. That will be discovered soon.
Imagine if you are right about the latter, you're getting 2 farms because someone in the other farm just messed up their merit cycling which is definitely a bad news for both farms, imagine that this investigation is going to lead to a deeper rabbithole. Hope you uncover more and that this kind of abuse stops because it's unfair to those who try to earn it honestly. If the former is right, I think it's weird that they only messed up this time, maybe this is a new owner or just plain stupid of that person that they got too complacent about hiding their abuse.