Google is widening its fight against AI-enabled fraud, filing a lawsuit against a suspected cybercrime group while also working with law enforcement, telecom carriers and lawmakers to curb scam texts.
The company said Friday that it is taking legal action against a China-based group it calls Outsider Enterprise. Google alleges the group used Gemini and other AI tools to create large volumes of fake text-message campaigns designed to steal passwords, credit card numbers and personal information.
According to Google, the operation relied on AI-generated websites impersonating government agencies and well-known brands. Those pages, the company said, were used in phishing efforts that incorporated trademarks and logos to make the scams appear legitimate. Google said the messages typically followed familiar patterns, including bogus package alerts, urgent bank notices and warnings about compromised accounts.
In its announcement, Google said the campaign has affected more than 100,000 people in the United States and caused losses estimated in the millions of dollars. The company also said the network is tied to more than 9,000 fake websites and about one million fraudulent URLs.
Google said the lawsuit is part of a broader response that includes coordination with the FBI. The company is also working with major U.S. wireless carriers, including AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, to stop suspicious texts before they reach users’ phones.
Halimah DeLaine Prado, Google’s general counsel, told The New York Times that the company views this as its first coordinated effort of this kind. She said the scale of the alleged scam helped drive the response.
The move underscores how AI tools are now being used not just to improve digital services, but also to automate and scale cybercrime. Google’s complaint suggests that the same systems designed to generate content quickly can also be repurposed to produce convincing lures for mass phishing campaigns.
Google is also backing seven bipartisan bills that it says are aimed at combating these scams. The legislative package includes measures intended to better protect older adults and to expand public education about AI-related threats.
The company has already taken other steps to try to reduce scam exposure on its platforms. Earlier in June, Google introduced fake call detection for Android, which flags suspected spoofed calls. The company said Android users flagged 55,000 spam texts over a two-week period in May, while more than 2.5 million messages from the group at the center of the current allegations were sent to Android users during the same period.
Google’s latest actions reflect a broader reckoning across the tech industry as AI lowers the cost and complexity of running large-scale scams. For companies building the tools, the challenge is increasingly how to limit misuse without restricting legitimate uses of the same systems.
The lawsuit and associated efforts suggest Google is now trying to address that problem on several fronts at once, through litigation, detection tools, partnerships with carriers and support for new legislation.