Not exactly the same, as this is more about spamming than trolling. But we’ve seen a recent trend toward using real human beings to infiltrate sites and build trust levels before posting links to promote their products. Had a recent one who looked that way on the surface so we checked Stop Forum Spam. No hits on the email address, but the IP address came up freckled with alerts. So we deleted “her.” Then she came back in a few days and pm’ed Admin wondering why her account had been nixed.
Thing is, the initial suspicious “tell” was the profile pic she used. It just looked SO much like it came out of a stock photo repository, as these new spammers all seem to do. So I did an image search on it. It came up as the very first item in this gallery of AI-generated profile pics, though there’s another one in that position now:
No way to blacklist someone based on a profile pic, but it’s good to know about this as more spam operations try using real people to get around the detection algorithms. Advice: if the profile pic looks like it came from a J Crew catalog, check to see if it’s a stock image.