Google is taking down a huge Chinese scam network, FBI is also involved. | Image by PhoneArena
Your Gmail may soon be a quieter place, as Google has unveiled a massive coordinated takedown on a huge China-based cybercrime network called “Outsider Enterprise.”
The scammers used Google’s own Gemini AI to sell phishing kits on Telegram and enable low-level criminals to generate messages from fake versions of popular services and government entities.
These include the U.S. Postal Service and New York's E-ZPass toll system, as well as Google and YouTube.
Google sues AI cybercrime ring
Google posted on its official blog page the plan to take down the operation. This plan starts with a lawsuit but also involves the FBI along with major carriers such as AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.
We’re filing a lawsuit to dismantle their infrastructure, coordinating with the FBI, who will be taking law enforcement actions, and will continue to work with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon to block these texts before they reach you.
- Halimah DeLaine Prado, General Counsel at Google
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The civil lawsuit targets the “Outsider Enterprise" group, but it's unclear whether this action will have any real consequence, as the network operates in China, where such legal action may have little to no effect.
Have you received any scam email or messages in the past two weeks?
Inside the massive phishing operation
The Outside Enterprise ran a massive phishing operation. | Image by The Telegraph
According to Google, the scale of the phishing operation is massive. Within two weeks more than 55,000 spam texts were flagged by Android users. That's more than two complaints every minute!
More than 2.5 million messages were sent by the this Chinese malicious group, and these messages contained links to fake AI-generated websites.
The sheer number of fake websites is also astonishing — the group managed to create more than 9,000 of these in just two weeks.
The irony here is that all of the above was made possible by the power of AI.
AI made scams "Plug-and-Play"
Google is using AI to fight AI scams. | Image by Google
Diving deep into the lawsuit papers, we find that the Outsider scam group offered more than 290 pre-built templates to impersonate popular institutions, including financial services, telecoms, government agencies, and retailers.
The "Outsider Enterprise" group also created an online community through discussion forums, where the group recruited members and sold its templates and services.
The criminals behind the Outsider Enterprise built a business out of impersonating trusted brands to defraud hundreds of thousands of victims. Criminals increasingly use AI to make fraud like this more convincing and harder to detect. Together with partners like Google, we can disrupt criminal networks in ways no single organization could on its own.
- Brett Leatherman, Assistant Director Brett Leatherman of the FBI's Cyber Division
The AI-built scam platform offered keystroke logging and a performance dashboard to track the success of a criminal’s phishing campaign—all from a single interface, no hacking or coding skills required.
The alleged subscription to these scam services started as low as $88 per week, and Google estimates the financial damages for the past two weeks at the scale of millions of dollars. Clearly a lucrative business model.
Lawsuits and legislations, but will they have any effect?
The lawsuit is just the beginning, according to Google. The company says it already implemented AI-powered defense mechanisms (again, the irony) across Android and Google Messages. Google says the defense is already working and blocking more than 10 billion malicious messages a month.
Meanwhile, the general rule of thumb when it comes to shady and suspicious mails and messages applies here as well. Don't open anything that looks remotely suspicious, and don't click on any links.
Hopefully, these new measures will make our online journey a bit safer.
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Mariyan, a tech enthusiast with a background in Nuclear Physics and Journalism, brings a unique perspective to PhoneArena. His childhood curiosity for gadgets evolved into a professional passion for technology, leading him to the role of Editor-in-Chief at PCWorld Bulgaria before joining PhoneArena. Mariyan's interests range from mainstream Android and iPhone debates to fringe technologies like graphene batteries and nanotechnology. Off-duty, he enjoys playing his electric guitar, practicing Japanese, and revisiting his love for video games and Haruki Murakami's works.
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