Google files lawsuit against Chinese cybercrime group over Gemini AI abuse

Google has taken a legal action against an alleged Chinese cyber group who are suspected of misusing Gemini AI to trick the users.

The group named “Outsider Enterprise” has abused the chatbot to send more than 2.5 million text messages with scammed links, aiming to scam cellphone users.

According to a lawsuit filed by Google on Friday, around hundreds of thousands of people in the US have fallen victim to these fraudulent tactics, such as sending malicious links to Outsider-generated websites to Android users in May.

The Chinese scammers also spread these compromised links through Telegram based messages that appear to be coming from Google and other trusted brands. These messages containing the links were sent with urgent warnings to steal the confidential information.

After clicking the link, the users were redirected to a website that asked for personal information. Moreover, the rogue actors also used Google’s Gemini chatbot to write the custom code needed to build their malicious websites.

The network used 9,000 fake websites and over 1 million fraudulent URLs. The exact amount of money lost to the spam messages was not specified in the complaint.

Nasrin Rezai, chief information security officer at Verizon, said in a statement, “As cybercriminals increasingly leverage advanced technologies like AI to execute sophisticated text-messaging scams, defeating these threats requires a unified, cross-industry response.”

“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.”