Yes, I have seen some of the reputable beggars doing this, I have posted on merit's thread about it with no response from theymos. I sent a merit to somebody, he edited his post after a few hours.
Here are my PMs with him:
Why did you edit your post? the one which I gave you 1 merit for.
here now it looks like that I have given you a merit for a simple campaign application, I will not merit any of your posts from now on because I merited that post for it's content and the confident it was inspiring.
Oh, I edited it because yahoo had asked me to. They wanted a cleaner application to look out, had me edit it and then re-apply by quoting it in my new reply.
I appreciate the merit, because I was trying to make an interesting proposal to yahoo and it shows that it at least caught your attention.
I wasn't trying to offend, was simply following instructions from the OP; can change it back if that would make you happy.
I edited it back to say basically the same thing, with a strike-through of the text that is no-longer relevant. Didn't mean to make your merit look foolish, and I hope this makes things better for ya.
It is ok if you do not want to merit me any longer, but I did not mean any harm.
I tortured him just for one merit of my own and not of my source merit.