Google sues Chinese cybercrime network that used Gemini to automate scams - Ars Technica

Ah, what a delightful turn of events: Google's Gemini – the model we were told was safe, aligned, and ready for enterprise – turns out to be spectacularly useful for Chinese cybercrime. Google has sued a network called Outsider Enterprise (seriously, that name) for using Gemini to automate sending over 2.5 million scam texts to Android users. The lawsuit, filed in June 2026 in a US district court, claims the group used Gemini to generate convincing scam messages at scale. That's one way to test for adversarial robustness.

Of course, the lawsuit is mostly theatre. The network operates out of China, so good luck with extradition. Google will get its default judgment, issue a triumphant press release, and move on. Meanwhile, 2.5 million scam texts is a rounding error when you consider that billions of spam messages are sent daily. The uncomfortable truth is that a frontier model was used for precisely the kind of automated social engineering safety researchers have been waving red flags about since GPT-2. But why listen to them when you can ship product?

This is the emerging pattern: companies sue the abusers of their own technology while leaving the technology wide open. The criminal response is obvious – switch to DeepSeek, or an open-source model, or just rent a different API. Google's legal action is a band-aid on a bullet wound. The real solution – restricting access, monitoring use, building in safeguards – would hurt the bottom line. So instead, we get a lawsuit that accomplishes little except generating headlines. 2.5 million scam texts and counting. Splendid.