What's the Scam?

The author of a security newsletter received a flood of AI-generated complimentary emails from randomly-named Gmail accounts that had never actually subscribed to the newsletter, creating a suspicious pattern they couldn't initially explain. In the comments, security experts propose several theories: the accounts may be "aged" through fake conversations to evade fraud detection before being used for scams like pig butchering, or they could be testing email address validity and responsiveness for later malicious use.