Diary of a frosty fraud
Posts from a pro-Trump X account with a GAN-generated face have repeatedly gone viral over the last month
Meet @MaryyFrost, a pro-Trump X account whose wildly inaccurate posts have gone viral on multiple occasions in recent days. This account, which uses a StyleGAN-generated face as a profile image, has had a blue verification checkmark since July 2023, presumably as a result of signing up for X’s paid subscription feature. Additional evidence that this “verified” account is far from legitimate turns up as one digs deeper, including multiple account name changes, prolific use of plagiarized photographs, and a lengthy history of financial spam. Despite these indicators of inauthenticity, the operator of the account has managed to gain over 70,000 followers in the past four years.
The @MaryyFrost account’s profile image is a GAN-generated face, similar to those produced by thispersondoesnotexist.com. There are multiple signs that this image is artificially generated, such as the total absence of one shoulder and the asymmetrical eyeglasses. Also, the textures of different portions of the image combine in implausible ways at boundaries — note the surreal blending between clothing, hair, and background in the lower left area of the image.
Although @MaryyFrost’s most popular recent material is right-wing political posts, it doesn’t take very much scrolling to encounter another side to this account. Much of the account’s content is financial spam, generally involving gold, retirement accounts, or both. The spam posts usually contain links, some of which are disguised as links to prominent websites. For example, multiple April 2024 posts about gold-backed IRAs contain links to the domain usa-today24.com, which unwary readers might confuse with news outlet USA Today. (These links actually redirect to a scammy-looking offer for a book about tax loopholes.)
A bit of digging reveals that the @MaryyFrost X account, which has the permanent ID 1200778254996721664, hasn’t always been named @MaryyFrost. The account’s handle has been changed at least twice, with the earliest known handle being @marefrost1996 (accompanied by the display name “Mare Frost”, according to Wayback Machine archives), later changed to @Mary_frostt before finally being renamed to the current @MaryyFrost. The name changes can be confirmed by viewing the posts archived under the prior names, as some of the posts are still online and show the present @MaryyFrost handle.
Photography, particularly pictures of cats, is a major theme of @MaryyFrost’s early X/Twitter posts. Although the account has received many compliments on these photos, none of them appear to be the account operator’s original work, as previous uses of almost all of the images can easily be found using TinEye or Google reverse image search. In some cases, the color palette has been altered slightly in the version of the image posted by @MaryyFrost.
The content posted under previous handles includes spam reminiscent of the recent “gold-backed IRA” spam, although a different domain is linked (regalassets.com rather than usa-today24.com). The older spam also includes posts advertising various product listings on Amazon and eBay. Unlike @MaryyFrost’s old political posts and plagiarized photos, most of the old spam posts have been deleted, and can only be found via Wayback Machine.
How did the @MaryyFrost account wind up with over 70,000 followers? By making use of Wayback Machine archives and recent data from SocialBlade, it is possible to partially reconstruct the history of various account statistics, including follower/following counts. The data reveals that the @MaryyFrost account’s follower and following numbers generally rose at the same rate at any given time, suggesting that the account operator participates in follow-for-follow schemes (forbidden under X/Twitter’s spam policy). The account’s presence on multiple follow trains under its previous handles corroborates this hypothesis.
The followback behavior is occasionally punctuated by brief periods of rapid unfollowing, wherein the @MaryyFrost account unfollows thousands or tens of thousands of accounts over a span of a few days. The bulk unfollows may be an attempt to give the account a higher ratio of followers to following, making the follow-for-follow behavior less obvious and causing the account to appear more popular than it actually is.
