Scammers Used Gemini AI to Help Build Spam Messages, Google Says

Alphabet Inc.’s Google filed a lawsuit against a suspected Chinese cybercrime operation, alleging that the group used artificial intelligence to send more than 2 million text messages with fraudulent links attempting to scam cellphone users.

Known as the Outsider Enterprise, the organization targeted hundreds of thousands of people in the US in an effort to steal personal information, according to a complaint that Google filed on Friday. The group is accused of sending 2.5 million messages to Android users containing links to Outsider-generated websites over a two-week period in May.

Aided by AI, the cybercrime network coordinated through Telegram to distribute links through text messages that appear to be from Google and other trusted online brands. The messages contained urgent warnings about supposedly compromised accounts or alerts regarding package tracking. Once users clicked on the link, they were redirected to a website that asked for confidential information.

Scammers encouraged one another to use Google’s Gemini chatbot to write the custom code necessary to create their malicious websites, according to the complaint. The complaint didn’t specify an estimated amount of money lost because of the spam messages.

There were 9,000 fake websites and more than 1 million fraudulent URLs associated with the cybercrime network, according to Google. The company said it also worked with AT&T Inc., T-Mobile US Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. to block the texts from reaching potential victims.

“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.”

Photo: Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg