What it seems is that if he is doing it to get more merits he has not done well because in the great majority of duplicated (or multiplied) threads, he has not gotten any merit.
Now what is not clear to me is what is going to happen with him. I think that because of this questionable way of acting he could be red tagged, because although we are not talking about trades, someone who acts like this does not seem to be trustworthy. Another thing is if the moderators will do something, because he constantly breaks unofficial rule 12, and with this I think that at least he could get a warning.
Maybe a rule against creating multiple duplicate posts, but given that he first locks, deletes or moves the other topic to archival board. I am not sure how it would apply.
Let's see if a moderator comes by and tells us, but I think it's clear from the behavior that he knows he's doing something questionable, and is trying to hide it.