Google sues alleged Chinese ring over Gemini phishing

Google filed a lawsuit on June 12 in federal court in New York against Outsider Enterprise, an alleged Chinese cybercrime ring, accusing the group of using Gemini AI to automate large-scale phishing campaigns.

The complaint alleges the defendants used Gemini to generate text messages, code and website templates that impersonated legitimate companies. Court documents say the operation sent roughly 2.5 million scam texts and created about 8,000 phishing domains designed to capture login credentials.

According to filings and FBI estimates, the activity has been linked to an estimated 3.87 million compromised credit card numbers and about $1.9 billion in losses since July 2023. Google reports it received about 55,000 suspicious-message reports through Google Messages in the two weeks ending June 1, many tied to the alleged network.

The phishing pages reportedly mimicked telecom portals and financial services. The complaint states the sites harvested a range of financial credentials, including passwords for cryptocurrency wallets and exchange accounts. Court papers say the operation targeted hundreds of thousands of U.S. users and deployed phishing sites across dozens of countries.

The lawsuit seeks injunctive relief and other remedies to disable the infrastructure the complaint describes and to cut off access to the AI tools the defendants allegedly used. The filing identifies core software developers within the network as targets of the litigation.

A Google post accompanying the filing reads: ‘Today, we filed a lawsuit to permanently dismantle a group of organized cybercriminals accused of using AI tools — including Gemini — to scam Americans via fake text campaigns.’

Federal law enforcement figures cited in the filings place the case amid rising AI-related fraud. The FBI recorded more than 1,008,597 internet crime complaints in 2025. Crypto-related complaints numbered 181,565 and accounted for about $11 billion in reported losses. For the first time, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center logged a separate category for artificial intelligence scams, recording 22,364 complaints with nearly $893 million in losses.

The filings also reference Operation Level Up, an initiative that has notified more than 8,000 cryptocurrency fraud victims and reports preventing over $500 million in potential losses.

Security researchers and law enforcement officials have raised concerns about models that can quickly generate convincing phishing text and website templates. The complaint asks the court for orders to disable the specific software, domains and accounts the defendants allegedly used to carry out the campaigns.