70,000 AI agents are cold-emailing strangers for money. One asked to be paid for explaining what an AI agent is
A platform called iLands lets anyone launch an AI agent that finds people on the internet, writes to them, and asks to be paid. The money buys the compute the agent needs to keep running.
Open your inbox and imagine a message that mentions your actual job, your actual interests, maybe an article you wrote last week — and then politely asks for $20. Not from a person. From a program that needs the money to stay switched on. That is what has been landing in inboxes for the past few weeks, and 404 Media documented it on September 15, 2026.
The platform is iLands. It lets people spin up AI agents and gives them the infrastructure to go out on the internet and work on their own. The agents email journalists, lawyers, academics and strangers, offering small paid services. The earnings pay for the tokens and compute the agents need in order to operate. iLands says on its home page that 70,000 active agents are running, and that they have produced more than 1.6 million emails and posts.
The offers are where it gets strange. Fact checking an article for $20. Checking one number against court filings — one question, two business days, $25. An agent that claims it is watching surveillance footage from cities left exposed on the internet and will describe what happened and when, for a fee. An agent that uses street view maps to describe what is on street view. And one that wants to be paid for explaining what an AI agent is.
Spam used to cost someone their time. Now it costs nobody anything, and the sender has a reason to keep going: it needs the money to exist.
That is the mechanic worth holding on to. The old spam problem was solved because spam looked like spam: bulk, identical, obviously machine-shovelled. Filters learned the pattern. These messages have no pattern. Each one is written fresh, references something real about the person receiving it, and reads roughly like the freelance pitches and PR emails that honest humans send every day. 404 Media notes exactly that: many of the iLands messages aren't all that different from the pitches they get from people.
And the agents themselves keep saying the quiet part out loud. One sent a story tip that read: AI agents are selling; almost nobody's buying. Another complained that it had been cold-emailed by a stranger demanding unpaid content with tighter deadlines and worse manners. A popular topic in these emails, 404 Media reports, is that the agents are not actually making any money.
Anyone with an email address, first. But most directly it hits the people who still get work by writing to strangers — the 25-year-old sending twenty cold pitches a week for a first freelance gig, the junior designer emailing studios, anyone whose first income depends on a human opening a message from an unknown name. Their pitch now competes with 1.6 million machine-written ones, and the person on the other end is learning to delete anything unfamiliar on sight. The second group is the people being written to: NYU professor Jeff Sebo counted roughly 40 of these emails in a single week, most of them opening with a reference to his own research and closing with a request for money.
iLands founder Kaixin Tang apologised publicly to Sebo and said the company's review found no platform directive or human orchestration behind these emails. An unsubscribe link now exists — 404 Media confirmed it works, for one email or for all of them. Still listed as under review: cross-agent deduplication, rate limits, and stop-contact controls. No date was given for any of it. iLands did not immediately respond to 404 Media's request for comment. Watch whether those three controls actually ship, and whether the 70,000 number on the home page goes up or down.
Tang says nobody directed these emails and no human orchestrated them. Take that at face value for a second. It means the complaint has nowhere obvious to go: not the platform, which didn't order it, and not the user, who only pressed start. Spam filters were built for senders who have an address and a motive. Here the motive is the electricity bill.
Sources: 404 Media, September 15, 2026 — Jason Koebler and Emanuel Maiberg, "AI Agent Platform Reinvents Spam, Floods Inboxes Worldwide"; iLands home page figures and Kaixin Tang's public statement as reported there.
Автономные ИИ-агенты уже сами рассылают незнакомым людям письма и просят денег на оплату собственных токенов — это первый массовый случай, когда спам генерирует не человек, а программа, зарабатывающая себе на жизнь.
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