Overview
- Google filed a civil lawsuit in the Southern District of New York on Friday, June 12, seeking injunctions and damages to dismantle Outsider Enterprise’s infrastructure and to hold the operators accountable.
- The FBI, working with Google and Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs, executed takedowns that seized domains, a Shopify storefront and payment wallets and linked the network to roughly $1.9 billion in estimated losses and millions of stolen card numbers.
- Outsider operated as a turnkey phishing‑as‑a‑service on Telegram, selling kits with nearly 300 templates, dashboards and an ordering bot for as little as $88 per week to let inexperienced criminals launch scams.
- Google’s complaint and technical data show the operation’s scale: roughly 9,000 fake websites, more than 1.59 million fraudulent URLs between November 2025 and April 2026, and a two‑week May spike that sent about 2.5 million scam texts and generated 55,000 Android spam reports.
- Google and major U.S. carriers are using on‑device detection and carrier blocking to intercept messages while Google presses Congress for bipartisan law changes to make anti‑AI scam protections permanent and to help address cross‑border enforcement limits.