I want to bring this to OP's attention. Campaign Manager yahoo62278 has found out there are members around here selling Merits. The accounts accused of selling were Degaton44
(profile) and mafoja1
(profile).
I looked up their posts and noticed a few things. Out of two accounts, one published only a few posts and the other has almost 200, although they still struggled to earn any Merit point. The latter only earned 13 points, out of which 3 were received in this thread
(post by Degaton44),
(post by mafoja1). The former only earned 4, all of which have been earned in this thread.
As a consequence, in order to avoid further farming of accounts that are only created to sell Merit points, I recommend OP that only accounts of Member and higher ranks are allowed to receive the Merit points for posting an Encrypted Message. This means a new account needs more than two months of activity and 10 Merits to be eligible. I am not aware of the price members pay for a single point, but I doubt it is worth the time and effort of farming accounts particularly for this malicious purpose.
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Edit because I found more connections and some of them got Merit points from this thread. All accounts below are linked to the same person, there is a network of many hundred. See the other thread here where I posted proof.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5425535.msg61398934#msg61398934rana250 tried to get Merits in the Sign a Message thread
(see this link).
aslam86 got 2 Merits in the Sign a Message thread
(see this link).
mafoja1 got 3 Merits in the Sign a Message thread
(see this link).
tamim60 got 2 Merits in the Sign a Message thread
(see this link) and tried again two months later
(see this link).
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Regards,
PrivacyG
