You could just scare them into honesty by threatening to ban any users who are falsifying their posts or counts. Put a 24 hour ban on abusers, or a week, or something that will entice them not to 'cheat'. Also, just so you know, users can post, then delete the post, and their post count stays up. This is how threads works by default. So they can post and delete with no one the wiser and end up with an inflated post count.
