This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on September 4th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.
They dangle high-paying jobs worth millions – and they fit your background perfectly. A new generation of scammers has arrived, working around the clock, with no human involvement.
A confidential email. A recruiter who finds my background interesting. Would I like to hear more about the position?
Messages like this land in my inbox more and more often. But there is rarely an actual recruiter behind them.
Instead it’s AI agents posing as someone else. This time I got curious and replied.
What are they actually after?
What appealed about my background was apparently “the depth of board experience across technology and consumer companies.” Steve – the borrowed name of the AI agent emailing me – then listed a long series of jobs and assignments I have held earlier in life. By pure coincidence, all of it lined up perfectly with what Steve was looking for.
That, combined with Steve’s inability to grasp that I was quite obviously winding him up on several occasions, convinced me this was not a real recruiter.
I decided to play along.
Steve then sent over three different roles he was filling. The first was an executive position at Spotify paying 3–5 million kronor a year. A promising start! The next was another senior job at a company I had already worked at once, and finally a chairmanship of a board. I replied that I would happily take all three at the same time. Great, said Steve!
There were, in other words, a few red flags along the way.
To begin with, the roles were described on the basis of my LinkedIn profile, and in the third person. “This is a logical next step for Björn.” Odd, given that there could hardly have been a shortage of other candidates. It is also unusual for a recruiter to pitch three different positions at once.
All three came with a list of documents required to move forward. A biography, a résumé, an assessment of strengths and weaknesses, and a career plan. Most people can produce a CV, but who keeps a written career plan on hand to share with prospective employers?
That would soon be explained.
Out of curiosity I sent Steve my résumé. If my hunch was right, the contents wouldn’t matter, so I took a few liberties.
I wrote, for instance, that I had won several Nobel Prizes, that I sat on the board of the international committee for standardized cutlery in Geneva, and that I had come second in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2004.
No reaction from Steve. He seemed pleased.
But then there was the rest of the paperwork he needed. Help was apparently available.
Steve could introduce me to his colleague Beverley, who would put those documents together for me – quickly and easily. It would only cost me 25,000 kronor. A trifle, given the millions he was offering me in salary.
That’s where I pulled the handbrake and stopped replying.
You can of course toy with these AI systems for fun, but there is a bigger and more serious issue here.
Soon the internet’s con artists will be working around the clock with credible-sounding approaches. And it will be easy to fall for them.
In many ways this is a logical progression from spam blasted out to anyone and everyone, in the hope that someone clicks a link and maybe buys something. Or at least hands over their card details.
Now they can – seemingly without any human involvement at all – write personal letters full of flattery designed to deceive you. The execution is still a bit clumsy, but give it a couple of months and the AI recruiters will have polished away the worst of it. Perhaps they will even learn to tell when someone is having them on.
As so often in life, common sense gets you a long way. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. But in this particular area the method closely resembles how things actually work. Getting an email from a headhunter you don’t know is neither strange nor unusual. In several of the cases where AI agents have contacted me, they have also borrowed the names of real people in the industry. Search for those names and you find plausible results. If you are even slightly inattentive, it is easy to believe the emails are genuine.
Sitting in my spam folder right now are two messages about a “high-impact opportunity” that apparently suits me. Those particular ones got caught by the ordinary filter. But it is probably only a matter of time before junk mail resembles the real thing so closely that the two are hard to tell apart.
This is not the AI future we were promised – but it is the one now in front of us.
Keep an eye on your inbox, so you don’t fall for it.
