Google and the FBI have moved to dismantle a China-based cybercrime network behind a vast text-message phishing operation, pairing a civil lawsuit from Google with FBI server seizures and support from the major US carriers.
The network, named by Google as “Outsider Enterprise”, is an AI-powered operation that has financially harmed hundreds of thousands of victims.
Operating since at least 2023, Outsider sold phishing kits on a subscription basis that let criminals blast out fake text messages impersonating Google and other trusted brands.
The texts pushed recipients toward fraudulent websites that harvested credit card and personal data. Google connected the group to 9,000 fake websites and more than one million fraudulent URLs.
An Industrial-Scale Operation
The figures Google released point to an operation running at industrial volume.
Over a two-week stretch in May, it said 2.5 million scam texts reached Android users, who flagged 55,000 of them as fraudulent, more than two complaints a minute.
The network coordinated through Telegram and, according to Google’s complaint as reported by multiple outlets, leaned on AI-powered software to mass-produce its fake sites at scale.
The FBI put the financial toll far higher than Google’s estimate of millions. The bureau linked the operation to roughly 3.87 million stolen credit cards and an estimated $1.9 billion in losses since July 2023, affecting people and businesses across 55 countries.
A Coordinated Takedown
The FBI codenamed its technical takedown Operation Ghost Hook, a part of a broader campaign it calls Operation Riptide.
The bureau said it seized multiple administration servers, a Shopify storefront, a test account, and around $100,000 in cryptocurrency from the group’s payment wallets.
Thousands of domains the operators had registered with US providers now redirect to an FBI seizure notice, and the bureau took over a Telegram bot that held data on the service’s customers.
Both Google and the FBI framed the case as evidence that AI is lowering the barrier to large-scale fraud.
In a statement included in Google’s announcement, Assistant Director Brett Leatherman of the FBI’s Cyber Division said criminals increasingly use AI to make fraud more convincing and harder to detect, and that disrupting such networks requires partnership no single organization could manage alone.
Alongside the suit, Google said it is backing seven bipartisan bills aimed at curbing AI-assisted scams.
