Google sued a Chinese cybercrime network on Friday, accusing it of using the company’s artificial intelligence to blast online financial scams to hundreds of thousands of Americans.
The internet giant also said it was coordinating for the first time with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and wireless providers such as AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon to shut down the network, known as Outsider Enterprise.
The Chinese group used Gemini, Google’s A.I. system, to create hundreds of fake websites mimicking companies like Google and YouTube and government operations like the Postal Service and New York’s E-ZPass service for highway tolls, the lawsuit said.
Google warned that A.I. had supercharged the problem of online scams and said it was trying to get ahead of what it believed could be a surge of online fraud using Gemini and other A.I. tools.
A.I.-powered scams are growing faster than other types of online phishing and fraud schemes, Google and law enforcement say. Cybercriminals defrauded Americans of nearly $21 billion last year, with about $893 million in losses linked to A.I., the F.B.I. reported.
“This is our first coordinated effort and lawsuit and that speaks to the breadth of impact that this particular scam has,” Halimah DeLaine Prado, Google’s general counsel, said in an interview.
In the lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Google accused the Chinese network of using its technology and brand for fraudulent purposes. It asked the court for a restraining order so the company and law enforcement can work to shut down the network.
Google said the network coordinated over the Telegram messaging service to share tips and trade software kits using A.I. to mass-produce scam messages across communications platforms.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been affected, the vast majority of them in the United States, Google said. The company could not pinpoint the amount of damages but said it was in the millions.
Using A.I., the Chinese network created 131 software kits that made it easy to create thousands of fake websites. In a two-week period in May, the group sent 2.5 million messages to Android phone users with links to 9,000 fake websites and over one million fraudulent internet addresses connected to the group.
“Criminals increasingly use A.I. to make fraud like this more convincing and harder to detect,” Brett Leatherman, the assistant director of the F.B.I.’s Cyber Division, said in a statement.