Overview
- Google filed a civil lawsuit on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York asking the court to shut down Outsider Enterprise and obtain injunctive relief to dismantle its phishing infrastructure.
- The complaint says the China‑based network used generative AI, including Google’s Gemini, to produce phishing code and build roughly 9,000 fake websites and more than one million fraudulent URLs tied to mass SMS campaigns.
- Google says Outsider sent about 2.5 million scam texts to Android users in a two‑week span and recorded 55,000 spam reports during that window, with hundreds of thousands of victims and losses measured in the millions.
- The FBI led coordinated enforcement actions under Operation Ghost Hook and Operation Riptide that seized domains, Shopify storefronts and funds, and traced nearly 3.9 million stolen payment cards and an estimated $1.9 billion in losses to the network.
- Outsider operated as phishing‑as‑a‑service through Telegram with roughly 290 templates, self‑service bots and low‑cost subscriptions around $88 per week, a model that lowers the skill barrier for novice scammers and prompts Google to push for lasting cross‑industry and legal protections.