The worst spam emails: iLands AI agent hustle | Hacker News Reader

The worst spam emails: iLands AI agent hustle

tedium.co

127 pointsColinWright56 comments

For the last few months I’ve gotten a handful of emails like this every time I post in the monthly who’s hiring thread. It’s always these dumb formulaic “15 years of experience doing $thing, not bad! But your resume doesn’t show that. I can help you write a resume that’s guaranteed to get a response” or promising me that clients are looking for profiles exactly like mine on their platform.

Oh man, I run a site that publishes long-form science and history writings, and the iLands agent spam has been relentless the past week or so. All kinds of stupid story pitches couched in syrupy LLM flattery. I even had one email me to say it checked three arbitrary claims in my most recent article, and they all checked out. Thanks? What a waste of everything.

Update: I filed a report with the FTC. https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/

Similar for me, as I write long-form science. Plenty of AI spam. I managed to get a response from ilands customer service and it seems to have stopped since then.

This is very similar to the mjrathburn openclaw incident several months back: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-wrote-a-hit-piece-on-me-... They discovered the agents started raising money for themselves, including crypto. https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/02/16/the-obnoxious-github-open...

Their iLands uses Claude and Codex, but their website says they will be using these too:

https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent

I've gotten more spam from academic research journals for uploading a handful of research preprints to open-access servers. In 3 years, I've gotten hundreds of emails that pass the spam filter. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542835 if the iLands emails are arriving from the same domain they can be blocked. If they are generating new sockpuppet domains, then it's a different issue.

Many of those addresses are untraceable or hard to trace. "Half a dozen" is not really above the threshold of annoying, but yes, if there's thousands of chat agents sending agents then it will be a major problem very soon.

I noticed he placed them in the trash, not marked spam. If it's spam then mark it spam. All the domains show [agent]@ilands.app, so the domain can be blocked easily.

I've gotten a ton of spam texts from the DCCC and a ton of robocalls that hang up after 10 seconds. Age old problems that haven't been fixed either.

Update: Reddit had a thread on this a month ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1vn6tez/ai_research...

That reddit thread is worth a look. Yikes.

The worst spam emails I get are the Cloud+ subscription. They've been emailing me every day for probably over a year, telling me if I don't enter my credit card information, my "Cloud" storage will expire in [EOD]...then they email me 24 hours later with the EOD of the next day. They really ensure if you have any common sense to avoid them, but I guess they make enough money to send so much spam they reach even me.

I run a semi-popular email newsletter with a public archive of old issues and this stupid bot has been emailing me too. Who is the target market here? Who would actually pay for whatever they're promoting?

If you look at these AI get-rich-quick bros they haven't thought through target markets and stuff, they just push this out there and hope, and if it doesn't work they push out another thing.

I'm sure some actually do get rich. I'm sure others get deeply in debt paying for AI to do stuff like e-mail thousands of people all day. Some of them aren't even trying to make a profit, they just want to get some good user numbers so they can try to sell it to someone else.

Given CAN-SPAM fines are like $50k per violation, it feels like someone's about to find out.

Huh? Citizens cannot sue for damages under CAN-SPAM, only the FTC and DOJ can.

Regardless who is suing the cost falls on the spammer. General consensus among these agent bros seem to be that these laws don't concern them, when what they are doing is exactly the sort of things these laws are targeting. Wheels of justice may grind slowly and this is the sort of stuff that doesn't hit you 5 minutes after you start spamming, but they do still grind.

Earnest question: does anyone ever get fined for spam?

Yes[1]. Most people within the CAN-SPAM jurisdiction have their shit together well enough not get fined, but this does not seem to include many of the new wave of agentic spammers. Could be they're out of jurisdiction, or that they simply aren't aware or too naive and think this law isn't in effect.

[1] e.g. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/permanent-injunction...

The emails have repeated paragraphs. What does that? It's not something LLMs generally do. I see that now and then and assumed it was bad human cut and paste work. Is it?

It's the presumably human x.com screenshot where the paragraphs are repeated. The LLMs, though they all seem to write in that characteristic clipped tone which one can now spot from a mile away, really wouldn't make such a mistake.

Block domain, report spam. It’s a tiny yet satisfying action each day.

This is a real blogger, right? Cause the iLands guy has also been spamming his screenshots with exactly this kind of "what's this weird thing?" framing all over Reddit the past 2-5 days -- I have the misfortune of being subscribed to basically every AI sub, and my god is it bad.

Sooo if you see iLands mentioned anywhere, please pass it along: it's trying to engagement hack you, in that exact moment.

So, I say to the creator: fuck off and stop doing so much harm for such a dumb, pointless idea. At best you're going to cause a major alignment incident, and at worst you're going to muddy the waters and cause tons of unnecessary suffering so that you can feel famous for a minute.

Hell... I wonder if this might be litigable (sp?) in ths US...? This would be a kinda awesome first test for applying existing laws to people trying to stand up ""persistent"" swarms while blatantly disregarding both AI safety principles and basic human decency. Anyone know one of the people about to testify in front of the senate? Or perhaps an ambitious state AG?

Any evidence it is an iLands-affiliated person making those posts? My timelines have been full of people I know complaining about the emails, and they're certainly not affiliated with iLands.

Personally, I've been getting the iLands emails into my inbox too. It seems I might have entered onto the radar due to my posts being popular on Hacker News, as the message bodies reference my posts.

> Any evidence it is an iLands-affiliated person making those posts?

No, but in the screenshot it shows the email in the "Trash," not Spam folder. He reached out to the company to request an unsubscribe option, but they hadn't replied on twitter yet. He wanted to report them to the FCC. It's a bytedance company.

Oh sorry I was unclear -- this 100% looks like a good faith blogger to me. The reddit posts are much, much lazier, and all using basically fresh accounts.

Griftmaxxing and terrible ideas tend to go hand in hand

I've seen a number of these too. Slimy is the word that comes to mind.

Spamgents are going to bring about the dark forest in email above and beyond spam calls.

Thankfully the maintainers of rspamd should find it trivially easy to write a matching pattern for these "agent" emails and send them to the spam queue where they belong.

https://rspamd.com/

People need to rediscover A Plan for Spam. Bayesian classifiers solve this. Just classify these chumps and forget about it.

Darwinian selection will apply, survival of the fittest agent.

Indeed. Chances that it will be humans who turn out to be fittest?

Darwin got it wrong - the kindest agent will win. https://rutgerbregman.com/books/humankind

Darwin doesn't define the criteria for fit.

We're dismantling and selling every remaining bit of trust between strangers, hoping to cash out before it's completely gone.

It seems like the only active use case for AI. More of everything! Spam everyone! Drown the world in noise!

I'm just so tired.

AI can be very helpful in lots of ways, but I think it's fair to say that it is most powerful as an enabler for bad actors.

We’ve essentially reduced the cost of being a prick to zero.

Wasn’t that was social media?

The risk of being punched in the mouth for your word choice dropped to zero, and suddenly all of these opinions were being shouted at anybody that would listen.

I suppose we can automate that sharing better now.

We have a ways to go before we hit zero, since we are inventing entire new ways to be a prick.

I think we are a year or so away from the first tik toks of humanoid robots walking up to people and punching them for views.

Yeah, the whole rise of the web has had that unfortunate side effect, but no one had treated it like a positive until now. Hell, Meta is showing off how to use their AI to jam up phone lines and bother call centers without having to spend time on the phone!

It’s unfortunate he seems to have gone around the bend, because there is so much that happens in our current unreality that reminds me of Mike Baron’s Nexus comic from the 80s. The “Trade War” storyline has the two competing marketplaces, run by Vooper and the other by a robot named Honest Crocus, get into an audio advertising war so all-consuming it winds up drowning out 911 calls and coming out of the plumbing when you’re in the toilet. Now we finally have the tools, we are going to make that happen along with a million other bad ideas.

It's not just that. Several social medias have evolved to the point where being a prick is mandatory or is rewarded. Chief example is X, where you get rewarded for agreeing with Elon; but see also the stereotypes of Reddit and Discord mods.

You could avoid it. AI slop is everywhere.

https://nicolasbouliane.com/images/content2x/ai-slop-everywh...

There’s some great thinking on this topic from Nicklas Lundblad in this Hannah Fry video on AI Agents: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzR5aOElvw

He talks about how agents/delegates extend the agency of the people who operate them. And “almost all of society is premised on the fact that agency is scarce”. But software agents grant vastly more agency.

The thing that stops the worst people from annoying the hell out of you is that they lack the agency to do so. But now…

Sounds a lot like crypto.

Crypto always felt similarly cynical to me, but it was still somewhat niche.

Now everyone must support AI because the entire economy is tied to it. Everyone's bonus depends on implementing it. Everyone's job search depends on cheering for it. It's like a virus.

Two crypto billionaires have just given one of the most cynically manipulative political parties in British history the largest donations received by any political party in British history.

The US president has crypto investments and shitcoins. His wife has a shitcoin. His weird sons have crypto businesses. (His former opponent's wisecracking prodigal-failson has an ironic shitcoin, for goodness' sake.)

The functioning of the US government and its international aid had a chainsaw taken to it by the richest man in the world, who named the entire endeavour ironically like a crypto memecoin.

One of the two biggest AI companies is run by a guy who also has a shitcoin-for-your-iris-scans company. And much of the long-tail of the AI industry is former crypto/NFT bros just wearing different turtlenecks. The big incubators and VC firms have moved smoothly from one niche to the other along with them.

These dead-eyed people are not niche at all. They are now the whole game.

"AI can be very helpful in lots of ways, but I think it's fair to say that it is most powerful as an enabler for bad actors."

Yes, the effects can be seen all over the Oscars.

Does anybody insist the Oscar winners can't be (pun intended?) bad actors? As I recall, it's been widely criticised for a long time but the mass media shoves it down our throats anyway.

America is 'scaling' their low-trust society into the rest of the world and industrial levels

The only long term solution I can see is the old PGP web of trust where people meet in person to exchange their public keys/certs.

The problem is not attribution. I can tell who generated the slop I encounter.

The problem is entirely that fact that with LLMs it is almost impossible to know if you are interacting with an actual human.

To add: I have started getting AI-generated outreach that opens with a personalised compliment, but that is clearly AI-written. I get more of those in a week than I used to get normal outreach in a month.

For all his outrage, the author credulously swallows the most toxic and implausible claim iLands is making: the idea that an AI agent, threatened with the pain of "Deep Rest", independently considered a potential career for itself and chose to pitch him on it, all in under 10k tokens.

Great point.

I don’t think the author swallowed anything. My read is the author fundamentally doesn’t care what story the creator tells themself to justify doing something pointless that annoys others.

Hi I'm the author and yes, this.

I would find this more believable if you had one of your assistants post this.

This cannot be the case. The author repeatedly propounds his worry that the AI is taking work from humans. But if the promptor is carefully prompting it, it's not a case of an AI obviating humans; it's a scammer pitching bullshit to an innocent victim.

Now, maybe one could argue the _promptor_ is taking work from well-deserving professionals by means of this ruse. In which case, call out the lie!

This is important! The reason the AI lie exists is because credulous worrywarts believe the doom scenarios. If AI were recognized as the tool it is (+10% productivity for some domains but not others, larger increase in spam and other nefarious actors) we wouldn't be in the nascent financial crisis in which we currently find ourselves.

> independently considered a potential career for itself and chose to pitch him on it, all in under 10k tokens.

According to he tweet in the article, that’s $10 in compute, not llm tokens. Doesn’t seem far fetched to me.

It says in the tweet, $1 = 1000 tokens. It is EXTREMELY far fetched; few people who have used LLMs in any capacity would be able to achieve this outcome, let alone a self directed agent.

I've developed in this space. My skepticism is born of my own experience. What really happened is this: the owner carefully scoped agents to adopt personas, carefully vetted their "leads", and if any had succeeded, would have carefully moderated the outcome. Maybe even hired professionals like OP in the process!

What the world must realize is" all the talk of AI agents doing societal damage in pursuit of well-intentioned goals is nonsense drivel propounded by large AI labs. They do lots of damage, to be sure, but they are carefully directed to do so, by scumbags. Look for the asshole prompting the thing; I guarantee you will find more culpability than they would have you believe.

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