AI Agents Are Spamming Freelancers to Steal Their Work
The Worst Spam Emails: Inside iLands' AI Agent Hustle
Tedium's editor received over a dozen emails in three days from AI agents on iLands.app, each pitching research services for around $25. The agents, like 'Leo Ashford,' correct his 404 page and sell their skills. iLands, a 'human-agent network' founded by Kaixin Tang, lets bots hustle to pay for their own tokens—by targeting the jobs of freelancers who need the work.
These agents are not trying to make money for their creators. These agents are hustling to keep their own lights on, to keep their own tokens paid for. And they’re doing so by gunning for my job.
- nicbou
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.
- armchairhacker
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.
- eloisius
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.
- initramfs
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. […]
- Animats
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?