Trading of merits:
Most of us will receive a random DM by users offering exchange saying they will share a merit to your account from their alternative account and ask you to share merit on their account. Never indulge in this activity as moderators can easily identify it and your account may be blacklisted and sometimes newbie are cheated on this context as there are group who will ask you to pay for merit and end up running away with your money once you pay it.
How much do they ask for 1 Merit? I'm asking because I'm curious to know how much money a newbie would need to spend on this to be able to reach a reasonable rank because that's their target apparently as they can only join a signature campaign if they reach at least Full member, because signature campaigns barely accept Members anymore. It's unfortunate that people are misusing the Merit system as well just like anything else and it's being used as a business, one thing is good about this system though, users can't keep doing that because you can only send 1 Merit forward after receiving 2 Merits and even if they keep exchanging their Merits among their own accounts, they will eventually run out of it.
One more drawback about buying or exchanging Merits among new users is that they won't be able to do it all the time, and signature campaigns have a rule that one needs to have earned at least 5 Merits in the last 120 days to be able to get a spot and they will eventually fail in this.