Meh. They haven't exchanged merits since 2018, almost 5 years ago. Only one of the accounts is in a signature campaign. In general its not really a good idea to tag users retroactively for this kind of thing, especially since it happened so long ago.

There's a couple of (what I strongly suspect are) farms of sig campaigners that frequently exchange merit with themselves. If/when I do bust them, the merit exchange will be supplementary evidence and not the primary reason for the tag.

For example, a long while back there was an account farm that exchanged just enough merits to rank themselves up enough to qualify for DT votes... They were blacklisted by theymos and received tags from various DT for attempting to manipulate the trust system.

Quote from: theymos on April 06, 2019, 10:56:58 PM

They're all now excluded from the DT selection process, so if the goal was to manipulate DT, someone blew ~580 sMerit in order to ultimately fail doing so.

Additionally, theymos offered this guideline about the issuance of red trust for minor 'crimes':

Quote from: theymos on May 04, 2019, 05:07:09 AM

- Forgiveness: Often people make fairly small mistakes, but then they seemingly get red-trusted for life. This isn't really fair, and it discourages participation due to paranoia: if you think that you have a 1% chance of running afoul of some unwritten rule and getting red-trusted for life, you might just avoid the marketplace altogether. Red trust should mostly be based on an evaluation of what the person is likely to do in the future moreso than a punishment/mark-of-shame.