No. Users achieve Leader status automatically. The only trust signal there is is the number of “likes” received, and you can get those with some sock puppets (which you would have anyway, why only build up only one user to “Leader” when you can have several).
They wouldn’t have to do it themselves. I’m pretty sure you can rent worker bees in China or whereever for such tasks (it’s done with mmorpgs afaik).
And high-quality back links attract top money. AFAIK sums paid can reach 4-digit numbers if only the page rank of the page where the link is placed is high enough.