Google has filed a lawsuit against an organised Chinese cybercrime network, accusing the group of weaponising Google’s own artificial intelligence (AI) tool, Gemini, to mass-produce and spread convincing financial scams to hundreds of thousands of smartphone users. The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, targets a sophisticated network known as the “Outsider Enterprise.”The company said that the group operated out of China and coordinating through the encrypted messaging app Telegram. It used Google’s Gemini system to build 131 distinct software “phishing kits” that allowed the scammers to mass-produce fraudulent messages and mimic trusted corporate and government brands, including Google, YouTube, the US Postal Service and New York’s E-ZPass highway toll system.
The scale of the ‘Outsider’ Operation
According to the lawsuit, AI technology supercharged the speed and believability of online fraud, allowing the Outsider Enterprise to operate at a huge scale. Google says that the group generated over one million malicious internet addresses to trap unsuspecting users.Also, hackers used Gemini to rapidly spin up 9,000 realistic counterfeit websites designed to harvest credit cards and passwords. In just a single two-week period this past May, the network blasted 2.5 million scam messages directly to Android phone users. Android users flagged 55,000 of these text scams over that same two-week window.“Criminals increasingly use AI to make fraud like this more convincing and harder to detect,” Brett Leatherman, the assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, said in a statement.While Google could not pinpoint the exact total of financial damages, it confirmed that hundreds of thousands of victims, mostly located in the US, have been scammed out of millions of dollars. The FBI previously reported that cybercriminals defrauded Americans of nearly $21 billion last year, with approximately $893 million in losses directly linked to AI-driven schemes.
A first-of-its-kind unified counterattack
Google’s legal action marks the first time the internet giant is coordinating a combined response with federal law enforcement and America’s largest wireless carriers. Google is working alongside the FBI, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon to track the network’s digital footprint and block fraudulent text messages before they ever reach a user’s inbox.Google has asked the federal court for an immediate restraining order to allow tech security teams and federal agents to legally dismantle the hackers’ underlying digital infrastructure.