Google sues AI-powered scam text network
Google's June 12 lawsuit says China-based Outsider Enterprise used Gemini to build phishing sites behind 2.5 million scam texts sent in two weeks.
On June 12, Google filed suit against a China-based cybercrime network it calls the Outsider Enterprise, the first time the company has gone to court over misuse of its own Gemini models. The complaint describes an operation that sent more than 2.5 million scam texts to Android users in a two-week stretch of May 2026, backed by over 9,000 fake websites and more than 1 million fraudulent URLs.
According to the complaint, members of the network used Gemini to generate custom code for phishing pages, then fed it into their own scam-site tooling. The fake pages impersonated Google, YouTube, the US Postal Service, and New York’s E-ZPass system, and Google says the scheme reached hundreds of thousands of victims. The company is coordinating with the FBI and with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon to block the texts and dismantle the infrastructure.
Why this matters
The notable number is not the victims, it is the production rate. Code-writing models collapsed the cost of spinning up convincing fake pages, so impersonation now scales like software. For a small business the exposure runs both ways: your customers can be hit by texts pretending to be you, and your team can be hit by pages pretending to be your vendors. A standing rule that official messages come from one known channel, plus the data-handling basics in the AI customer data privacy baseline, is cheap insurance. If AI handles any of your customer support, make verification part of the script.