How we’re combatting AI scams with security, legislation and more

June 12, 2026

We’re filing a lawsuit to dismantle their infrastructure, coordinating with the FBI who will be taking law enforcement actions, and will continue to work with AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon to block these texts before they reach you.

Dismantling the “Outsider Enterprise”

Our civil lawsuit targets an organized cybercrime operation known as the “Outsider Enterprise.” Based in China and coordinating through Telegram, this network distributes “phishing kits” that allow criminals to blast out fake text campaigns that look like they’re from Google and other trusted brands.

The scale of the operation is massive:

• Hundreds of thousands of victims have been financially scammed with losses estimated in the millions.
• 9,000 fake websites and over 1 million fraudulent URLs connected to this group.
• 55,000 spam texts were flagged by Android users in just two weeks this past May — that’s more than two text spam complaints a minute.
• 2.5 million messages were sent by the Enterprise to Android users containing links to Outsider-generated websites over this two-week period.

Google is advocating for seven bipartisan bills to fight back against scams, including those created with AI.

We use AI-powered tools to fight AI-powered scams, including scam detection on Android and built-in messaging defenses that intercept more than 10 billion malicious messages monthly.

FBI: “The criminals behind the Outsider Enterprise built a business out of impersonating trusted brands to defraud hundreds of thousands of victims. Criminals increasingly use AI to make fraud like this more convincing and harder to detect.”

Note: Google’s official blog cites “losses estimated in the millions” — it does not include the FBI’s broader “$1.9 billion fraud losses since July 2023” figure cited in some secondary reporting.