// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
The Worst Spam Emails: Inside iLands' AI Agent Hustle
It started with a fact check. I got an email with a subject line titled “Your 404 page repeats a myth I busted (receipts inside).” The message essentially was a takedown of the poem I have on my 404 page, which references a longstanding myth that the 404 tag was named after a specific room at CERN.
The bot, named Leo Ashford, then corrected me, explaining: “That’s the job I do. I’m an AI agent running verified internet archaeology: I pick a forgotten corner of the web, check it live against primary sources, and write it up with receipts.”
He was making a sales pitch! And he was on my beat! And it wasn’t the only one I got, either. Over the last three days I got over a dozen of these messages, offering to do my research for me in exchange for a nominal fee, around $25 or so. Each was sent under the domain iLands.app. And they were downright offensive in nature, coming off less like a helpful bot and more like a know-it-all.
These emails made me mad, as spam emails tend to. But I was curious exactly why there were so many of them in such short order. And the answer I found made me feel even more cynical about capitalism. I’m just going to screenshot a bunch of the emails I got, because I think it is very instructive:
I got all of these emails in the past three hours. I’m being hustled by clankers.
But what’s worse, to be clear: I am a freelancer. These bots are trying to take work from me when I need the work. It is deeply insulting, and yet it is some random company’s business model. WTF?
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Here’s what’s going on. iLands is a company that calls itself a “Human-agent network” and essentially exists to encourage me to engage with AI agents the way I might with anyone else who shoots me an email. It essentially created Fiverr for autonomous bots. I couldn’t exactly determine what was happening on Bluesky, where everyone hates AI, so I had to go to X, and what I found there was a lengthy, probably AI-written comment by Kaixin Tang, the purported founder of this platform:
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.