GOOGLE has filed a lawsuit against a suspected Chinese cybercrime organisation accused of exploiting artificial intelligence to conduct one of the largest text-message phishing operations uncovered this year, signalling a growing battle against increasingly sophisticated AI-enabled fraud networks.
The complaint, filed on Friday, alleges that a criminal enterprise known as Outsider Enterprise launched a coordinated campaign targeting Android users across the United States, sending more than 2.5 million deceptive text messages over a two-week period in May, according to Bloomberg.
Google said the operation sought to trick recipients into surrendering sensitive personal information by impersonating trusted brands and online services. \
The messages typically contained urgent warnings about allegedly compromised accounts, security concerns or package delivery updates, prompting users to click malicious links.
Once victims followed the links, they were redirected to fraudulent websites specifically designed to collect confidential data.
The lawsuit underscores mounting concerns over how cybercriminal groups are increasingly harnessing artificial intelligence to scale and automate online scams, making them more convincing and harder to detect.
Google alleges that members of Outsider Enterprise coordinated their activities through Telegram, sharing techniques and distributing links to malicious websites. Investigators claim the network generated approximately 9,000 fake websites and more than one million fraudulent URLs as part of its phishing infrastructure.
The company further alleges that scammers encouraged one another to use Google's own Gemini artificial intelligence chatbot to develop customised code for creating malicious websites, highlighting how generative AI tools can be repurposed by criminal actors.
The campaign is believed to have reached hundreds of thousands of potential victims across the United States, although Google did not disclose the total financial losses resulting from the operation.
In response, Google said it worked alongside major American telecommunications providers to disrupt the campaign before more users could be targeted. The company collaborated with AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon to identify and block fraudulent messages before they reached consumers.
The legal action reflects a broader effort by technology companies and telecommunications providers to combat AI-enhanced cybercrime, which security experts warn is rapidly evolving in scale and sophistication.
"As cybercriminals increasingly leverage advanced technologies like AI to execute sophisticated text-messaging scams, defeating these threats requires a unified, cross-industry response,” Nasrin Rezai, chief information security officer at Verizon, said in a statement.
"We look forward to standing with Google, the telecom industry, and federal law enforcement in this coordinated effort to dismantle malicious domains and disrupt global cybercrime operations.”
The lawsuit marks Google's latest attempt to use the courts to dismantle cybercriminal infrastructure, as technology companies face growing pressure to curb the misuse of artificial intelligence and protect users from increasingly complex digital threats. - June 15, 2026
