They’re vibe-coding spam now

https://tedium.co/2026/02/25/vibe-coded-email-spam/

by raybb • 4 months ago

132 73 4 months ago

definitely a big issue especially with all the big places now vibe coding and leaking all our damned data in plaintext. a lot of people are getting hit real hard now. its not a joke or overstatement.

mbernstein• 4 months ago

I've noticed a gigantic uptick in text messages and phone calls where people try to bypass the call screening. It may get to the point where I'll only want to see comms from people in an allowlist.

varispeed2• 4 months ago

I don't answer the phone from anyone I don't know. If it is something important, they'll find a way to reach me.

saidnooneever2• 4 months ago

I usually answer unknown numbers if they are from my own country only. And then i open with a sound like 'huh??' so they cannot do the voice cloning. if no one says anything then hang up. usually its robocalls using crappy TTS but there are crews with more advanced capabilities out there.

righthand• 4 months ago

Full circle.

sankalpnarula• 4 months ago

Blacklisting Phone numbers and IP are gonna become extreme now, to the point it wont allow any unknown number/email without `karma` to reach anyone.

qsera3• 4 months ago

I don't understand why something like this exists natively on phones.

If someone calls from an unknown number, they get some sort of captcha to prove that they are a human, or they matter is important.

For example, the message should say that, if you are geniune, then please call again after 1 minute..

craftkiller• 4 months ago

That already exists, it's "voicemail". The scammers never leave a voice mail (idk why). If a real person is trying to reach you, they'll either leave a voice mail or text you after you don't pick up.

SchemaLoad3• 4 months ago

ios added "Call screening" which asks unknown callers to explain who they are and what they want before it rings the receiver.

The tricky part for scammers is there is no good answer here, if you claim to be a plumber and the victim hasn't booked a plumber, they won't answer.

hollow-moe• 4 months ago

They don't even need to actually vibecode the emails. Some scam reached my gmail inbox for the french railway company advantage card at a "too low to believe" price. They just downloaded an original email, replaced content urls to their own host and all links to their scam page. Yes, all links even the socials lol. There's one link that was removed instead of replaced (but the text was still there): the unsubscribe notice. I didn't check the page but the email was well done since it just was an edited official one and if the page was equally made I'm sure at least some people got scammed there.

imiric• 4 months ago

This is hardly new, and it goes far beyond spam emails. Most of the content produced and consumed on the internet is now done by machines. A human may or may not benefit from directing a machine to do this, and the ways they do are often highly opaque, with several layers of indirection. It doesn't take a genius to see that this is ushering in a new era of scams and spam.

"AI" companies are responsible for this mess. They should be held accountable for digging us out of it.

segmondy• 4 months ago

... does't matter if they got flagged as spam.

add-sub-mul-div• 4 months ago

That LLMs are enabling more use cases to hurt us than help us is too obvious to deny. But too many people think they're going to be the ones getting rich from it so they pretend it's not the case.

userbinator• 4 months ago

The (now possibly vibe-coded) email clients hiding link destinations and the real senders' addresses as well as making it very hard to see the actual message content including all headers don't help either. Scammers might get the visible body content very convincing, but one look at the Received: and From: headers is still a reliable way to discern.

mememememememo• 4 months ago

It is better to use the term phishing for spam that is attempting to comprimise your security, over just trying to sell something.

LLMs are interesting for phishing as they allow personalisation. Spam is no longer, well exactly the Monty Python meaning.

Cider99862• 4 months ago

At this point, if you give out your email and not aliases; it is on YOU.

joecasson• 4 months ago

Did you read the article? It was about how the spam is less interesting now when the person had typically enjoyed reading spam emails.

Cider99862• 4 months ago

"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that"." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

viccis• 4 months ago

This is interesting but I am not surprised. People got used to spammers putting in zero effort because it's a game of scale for them. Well now zero effort still gets them all the way there when it comes to looking convincing.

usrusr• 4 months ago

It's more than a game of scale: people who almost but not quite fall for the scam that follows the spam incur real cost to them. They don't want to trick as many people as possible with their mail, they want to trick only the most vulnerable. The obvious (to most people) mistakes are in there deliberately.

This changes, of course, with phishing. Will phishing by email even survive when voice imitation calls become more and more available? I guess it will, the bar for monetization is too low bar with resellable accounts and the like.

Ucalegon• 4 months ago

Leaders in the email security space have been seeing this for a while now [0], this is not new. The problem is the means to protect consumer mailboxes outside of Gmail, isn't cost effective since most people do not actually pay for their consumer mailbox and the impacts of compromised accounts do not actually impact the providers. It is going to be interesting to see how this plays out in the consumer space as the complexity of the problem continues to grow while the technology used to stop it stays in the early-2010s.

[0] https://siliconangle.com/2023/12/19/new-report-warns-rise-ai...

marcus_holmes• 4 months ago

I agree, and I think the answer is that what used to be free, and is now infected with all sorts of enshittification, will be paid-for to be useful.

I pay for email via Fastmail, don't really have a spam problem. I think this addresses your point above, that to have an effective spam filter takes money, and free email doesn't generate money.

I pay for search via Kagi, don't see all those crappy Google Ads and actually get useful search.

I can see the other services (socials, messaging) moving to a paid model to solve the same issues.

MarleTangible2• 4 months ago

With various websites planning to introduce micro-transactions to read their contents, maybe the end-users should start charging for email deliveries.

You want to send me an email? Please give me $1 first, and if I don't like your content I can, without notice, change that number to $50 per email.

mostertoaster• 4 months ago

I thought the “sponsored by nobody” thing to donate through was another example of the spam at first.

sudo_cowsay• 4 months ago

But is this something new? Wasn't using AI for scamming around for a long time?

Scammers started using LLMs to write fishing emails, then scammers started generating images, then they started using AI to vibe code it. Its just a natural progression.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47435156, we can know that India has a ~70% positive view on AI. While scammers likely didn't fill out the survey, it shows the general view on AI from where most scammers work from and live.

jordanb• 4 months ago

Scamming and cheating on homework were the original use cases of AI like buying drugs and extortion were the original use cases of crypto.

user_7832• 4 months ago

it shows the general view on AI from where most scammers work from and live.

Got any citation on that? From what I've seen, the vaat majority of scams are targeted at other Indians. The government runs a significant number of cyber awareness programs nowadays; don't think they appreciate scammers.

shusaku• 4 months ago

For years I’ve read people claim that the reason spam emails were low quality was to filter for idiots. If the spammers are now reaching for coding agents to clean up the presentation, it seems that theory was bunk.

integralid• 4 months ago

That theory was always bunk. People just can't comprehend, that the average spammer really is that bad. So that theory was created to make sense of that.

Because of my work I investigated a lot of spam, and I discovered real life identities of senders in many cases (because of horrible or no exostent opsec). Most of them were either underage, lived in third world countries, or both.

SchemaLoad3• 4 months ago

Scams got sophisticated a while ago where they would exactly replicate things like password reset emails and such including a whole fake replica website that looks identical to the real one.

I saw someone fall for one recently where a scammer had created a fake announcement from an email sending company stating they were adding political messages to the bottom of your sent emails, and to log in to opt out. The look and feel of the email was pretty much perfect.

bombcar• 4 months ago

Remember that a large portion of the "real scam" is selling scamming techniques and systems to wanna-be scammers, some who never figure out how to replace the "insert viagra link here" text.

tdeck• 4 months ago

Phishing too. At one point in my job I was involved with taking down phishing sites, and we would sometimes get a copy of the Phish kit code from the site owner. These were basically extremely poorly written PHP scripts that people would buy from a scam-enabler and deploy to some website. The sophistication was the lowest possible level at each step. But even if you find the perpetrator bragging about it on Facebook, they're in Nigeria (for example) and the local government doesn't care at all.

MarleTangible2• 4 months ago

The new trend is that the legitimate corporations sending you spam regardless of your communication settings, or even after unsubscribing for the 10th time.

Yes, I'm looking at you Teal HQ, you're spamming us even 3 months after deleting our accounts.

eucyclos2• 4 months ago

The reason you'd want to filter for idiots is that a smarter person would waste the scammer's time when they figure out it's a scam after some human interaction. If the ai can take you all the way to the close, there's no reason to filter any more.

Daz912• 4 months ago

Scammers have no shortage of time to communicate with potential victims.

b00ty4breakfast• 4 months ago

Spam and LLMs are made for each other; pumping out content, with little concern for quality, at industrial scale is what LLMs most excel at.

Even if it's not the only they can do.

monster_truck• 4 months ago

I've gotten so much blatantly obvious garbage like this. The corner radiuses etc always give it away.

Recently reported nearly 200 firebase accounts to google, haven't gotten any since

vancroft• 4 months ago

Email clients should just strip out hyperlinks. You link in the email? Write it directly, then people can copy/paste it. It wouldn't stop all phishing, but it would be a start to increase people's awareness of shady links.

wolpoli• 4 months ago

I am quite surprised that Google hasn't done this in the name of security, as email, one of the few channel that brands do not have to pay any middleman, is a competitor to search ads.

suroorw• 4 months ago

All these marketing pages with big bold text and unaligned scattered images have always felt spammy to me even when vibe coding was not there. Now that it is, you will ofcourse see that multifold. Given the humans are still the same behind it.

autoexec• 4 months ago

The mail I care about doesn't look like ad copy. It's usually plain-text or at least reads fine when displayed that way. It comes from people I know and/or care about. Attached images don't display by default. Remotely hosted anything doesn't even get requested. Fancier looking spam is just going to be easier to spot.

iamcalledrob• 4 months ago

The "Cloud Storage Full - ACTION REQUIRED" emails sure aren't helped by Google, who communicate in a similar way.

The amount of borderline harassment I get about my Google Drive being almost full is shocking.

They have really amped up the ferocity of the language they're using to try and extract money from you for Drive. No wonder spammers are copying that.

nwellnhof• 4 months ago

On top of that, all these spam and phishing emails are sent through Google servers. About two thirds of spam I receive originates from Google, 12x more than AWS and 20x more than Microsoft. This is completely insane.

windward• 4 months ago

My usage hit ~90% 5 years ago and hasn't shifted since. Apparently Google lack the means to see this line doesn't intersect with 100%, and no action is required.

Thankfully they do have the means to change the wording of the emails I can't unsubscribe from. I don't know what the official reason is but the result is I have to modify my filters.

Apple are no better. Choose between a permanent nag notification on Settings, my most trusted app, or disabling backup of all the negligibly-sized data.

bux93• 4 months ago

They know. They're hoping you don't notice the line doesn't intersect.

TitaRusell• 4 months ago

Google and Microsoft got people hooked on free cloud storage. And now they want money for it.

georgefrowny• 4 months ago

I remember when Google promised Gmail storage would increase (quote) "forever". A mind blowing at the time 1GB at launch in 2004 to 2GB only a year later. Then 4 GB in 2007. This was prime Google doing cool stuff constantly time. Up to 10 by 2012 and then they rolled up Drive and Photos to 15GB in 2013.

It hasn't moved since.

tempodox2• 4 months ago

No wonder spammers are copying that.

Are you sure it’s not the other way around?

Ekaros• 4 months ago

Both spammers and google's mail is in my spam box in gmail... Both messages are very similar... And google's contain the classic urgency baits. Not being able to receive email and so on...

eightman• 4 months ago

The use case for AI is, was and always will be spam.

isaachinman• 4 months ago

It's very sad indeed that email ever allowed HTML. The world would be a better place if email was only plaintext

yurii_l• 4 months ago

Now even phishing emails have better UI than half the SaaS market =)

c16• 4 months ago

The only advice I give now is: If you're contacted and think it might be genuine, go direct to the website. Don't click anything.

I suspect it's the only reasonable advice now?

hmokiguess• 4 months ago

Unlike most people, I actually read my spam folder on a regular basis.

I too suffer from this, and one thing that has been increasingly annoying to deal with, even worse than spam imo, is the cold outreach campaigns from software vendors, recruiters, marketers, etc.

I get so many of them that I am now getting to a point of considering writing my own rules engine to filter the noise, it's infuriating.

tempodox2• 4 months ago

Vibe coding and spam are a perfect fit. What took them so long?

I’d even say all vibe-coded slop is spam as soon as anybody else than the original perpetrator has to read it.

cat-turner• 4 months ago

It's funny getting calls when Apple shows you the transcript that says "hindi swear words" and its labeled a spam call.

I think as agents become more pervasive, there will be an arms race of ecosystems to screen them out.

delimit• 4 months ago

The spam angle is interesting but the bigger problem is vibe-coded API changes that silently break downstream consumers. Someone generates a new endpoint, renames a field, changes a response shape — and nothing catches it because there's no schema diffing in the CI pipeline. Silent breaking changes in internal APIs are way harder to catch.

They’re vibe-coding spam now

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