Someone here's very good at this:
Ok Mr self appointed expert who seems to think we should all bow to your superior intellectual accumen. SInce everybody else is wrong, and your so right, and since you hate and detest single merchants so much, here's what you do, and ONLY YOU will have to do this, because i highly doubt much anyone cares as passionatly about this "issue" that you do, and you can do this in one of two ways.
1.) Load the mission editor. Load the Campaign.RND file. Find every instance of a single merchant contact, in the explorer window, right click on it, go to group properties and where the section of contact reports is, put in -1, and 0%.
or you an
2.) Open the the campaign.RND file in MS wordpad, look for whatever the contact report variable is called, then do something like find "ContactReporttime =" and replace it with ContactReporttime=-1, do the same for probably, and reset them all to 0%.
do that for the entire freaking file. If i have this backwards in this descrption all you have to do is find an HK group entry, and look at its its contact probably as you do not receive contact reports for them. Emulate those settings for all your single merchants.
Of course that will kill your convoy contract reports as well, so you'll have to go back and put those back in through the editor.
Since your so smart, im sure you can handle it. If you hate other peoples work so much, then do some of your own work, half the people here mod their own game, and probably can't comprehend why you just dont do this change yourself, rather then sit here and bitch about it.