Cheating or ridiculously prepared??

Hi. I played very solidly a year ago and just started playing again recently. I started a new account and started rank 600, so the shard was definitely new. I rushed to 28 within about an hour of starting. I immediately look at the rankings and there's a guy already at level 47. At the end of the day, nobody is even close to him. Ok, maybe he saved up a bunch of energy before leveling or just dumped a ton of crystals in energy... It's possible. I go and look at his characters. He has 30 characters, many rare, and most are 4-5 stars. He even has a 7 star scavenger Rey. The only way to get her to 7 is 1 hard battle in level 2 and another hard battle you don't have access to until level 49... Again possible but highly unlikely and extremely expensive with the escalating refresh costs. Lastly, he had 24 guild raids completed within hours of the new shard being created... As far as I know, this is almost completely impossible unless he had an established guild ready and waiting specially for him to blow a ton of raid tickets just for him to go through the raids... Either this guy was extremely prepared and dumped a lot of money or this is all very shady.
Thoughts??