Overview
- Google filed a civil suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on June 12 seeking injunctive relief and alleging trademark violations and RICO racketeering to force the takedown of an operation it calls Outsider Enterprise.
- The complaint says Outsider operated over Telegram and sold phishing‑as‑a‑service kits that used Gemini and other AI to generate code, templates and realistic fake webpages at scale.
- Google reports the operation produced roughly 9,000 fake sites, more than one million fraudulent URLs and sent about 2.5 million scam texts to Android users during a two‑week spike in May, with hundreds of thousands of victims and losses in the millions.
- The company is coordinating with the FBI and major U.S. carriers including AT&T, T‑Mobile and Verizon to block messages and support law enforcement takedowns, and officials say some domains and storefronts tied to the scheme have been seized.
- Beyond the lawsuit, Google is pressing Congress for permanent protections and the case highlights how generative AI lowers the skill barrier for large‑scale phishing and creates new cross‑border enforcement challenges.