Google is suing to dismantle the infrastructure behind an alleged massive AI-powered cybercrime operation.
On Friday, the tech giant announced a lawsuit against an alleged Chinese cybercrime network called Outsider Enterprise, which Google says uses AI in its campaigns to send scam text messages impersonating Google and other brands to steal passwords and credit card numbers.
Outsider Enterprise has financially scammed “hundreds of thousands of victims” with losses “estimated in the millions.” The group deployed 9,000 fake websites, one million fraudulent web domains, and 2.5 million texts sent to Android users in a two-week period, according to Google.
The company said, “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.”
Google said it uses “AI-powered tools to fight AI-powered scams,” which enable the company to detect scams and alert users of suspicious calls and text messages, leading to the interception of more than 10 billion scam messages a month.
The company said it has been collaborating with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon to block the scam text messages, and said it is coordinating with the FBI.
An FBI spokesperson told TechCrunch that the bureau, in coordination with Google and Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs, seized several domains used by the cybercriminals, as well as Shopify storefronts and accounts used to test the operation’s phishing service.
The spokesperson said that since July 2023, Outsider Enterprise’s phishing platform enabled cybercriminals to steal “at least an estimated 3,870,000 stolen credit cards and a corresponding estimated $1.9B in losses.”
Inside Outsider Enterprise
In its complaint filed as part of the lawsuit, Google laid out the evidence it gathered against people involved in the Outsider Enterprise operations, whom the company said are foreign-based cybercriminals whose real identities are unknown. This group “built, maintains, and uses a turn-key, online software suite that enables criminals, regardless of technical skill, to publish fraudulent websites designed to rob victims and enrich themselves,” according to the complaint.
Google said this “phishing-for-dummies” software called Outsider, which costs $88 per week or $200 per month, allows operators to create fake websites with the help of AI platforms, including Google’s own Gemini. The fake sites impersonate several services and companies, such as telecom providers, financial institutions, government agencies, and retailers.
To lure people to the fake websites, the cybercriminals collaborate with one another to send victims malicious text messages, or purchase ads. The common goal is to steal passwords and corresponding multi-factor codes as well as financial information, which the scammers can do by receiving the data that victims input into the fake websites, with the information being transmitted through Outsider’s platform in real time.
“Part of the Outsider software’s appeal is the ease with which someone with limited technical expertise — like many members of the Enterprise— can purchase the software, execute various phishing attacks, and, upon purchase, meet other members of the Enterprise who are proficient in other areas,” Google wrote, referring to Telegram channels where the cybercriminals can collaborate, train each other, discuss strategies, and develop phishing attacks. “The Enterprise brazenly coordinates its efforts in open and largely uncoded discussions on Telegram.”
According to Google, the Outsider platform allegedly offers cybercriminals “more than 290 pre-built templates that mimic the legitimate websites” that generate replicas of real websites “in minutes,” along with guides on how to “weaponize AI-generated code,” as well as a dashboard to track progress of phishing campaigns. The cybercriminals have allegedly used Google Drive and Google Cloud infrastructure to host the phishing websites.
“The Outsider software has been used to create over a million phishing websites to swindle innocent victims out of millions of dollars,” Google wrote in the complaint.
To give an idea of the scale of Outsider Enterprise’s operation, Google said that over a five-month period, from November 14, 2025 to April 14, 2026, the company detected more than 1.59 million URLs connected to it.
Google said the Outsider Enterprise operation is made up of several groups of cybercriminals: those who develop and maintain the phishing software and website templates; those who supply lists of targets curated from public records, social media, and data breaches; a “spammer group” that provides tools and the infrastructure to send scam texts in bulk, which includes smartphone banks, SIM cards, and modems; and those who monetize the stolen credentials and launder the stolen money.
The cybercriminals have stolen “at least 36,000 payment cards issued by financial institutions in 95 countries,” according to Google.
The company accused the people behind Outsider Enterprise of impersonating Google and its brands, of infringing its copyright, of racketeering activities, of committing wire fraud, and false advertising. With the lawsuit, Google is seeking compensatory and punitive damages, and an order to stop the criminals from carrying out their activities.
This story was originally published at 10:26 a.m. PDT and has since been updated with new information from Google’s complaint, and the FBI’s comment.

Before Juan Hernandez became a welder at SpaceX, he had never heard of the company.
“It was just another contract job for me at the time,” he told CBS News correspondent Jo Ling Kent in a broadcast exclusive interview.
Now, just over 10 years later, that leap of faith is paying off following the company’s $75 billion initial public offering. Hernandez, who now works at Jeff Bezos-owned rocket startup Blue Origin, has roughly 6,500 SpaceX shares. On Friday, SpaceX stock closed at $160.95, valuing his holdings at $1,046,175.
SpaceX shares started trading on the Nasdaq late Friday morning under the ticker symbol SPCX, marking the long-awaited Wall Street debut of the rocket and satellite company.
Hernandez first heard about SpaceX from a friend who was hired as a welder there. He knew Hernandez’s background and figured he’d be a good fit for the job.
“I thought in my head, I don’t know what SpaceX is, but let’s go,” Hernandez said.
When SpaceX hired Hernandez in 2015, he said they offered him $10,000 worth of stock. At the time, he didn’t think much of it. His other jobs, for which he was paid hourly, had never offered him stock before.
“It wasn’t a big deal. I didn’t know anything about it then,” he told CBS News. “I didn’t know it was gonna be this big, at this point.”
Rising through the ranks
During his ten-year run at SpaceX, Hernandez worked as a welder, preparing rockets for takeoff by building the structures that lifted them onto the launch pad and the infrastructure that held them in place. He eventually rose through the ranks to become a supervisor.
He said offering employees a stake in the company helps them feel they have skin in the game and pushes them to succeed.
“They will perform a lot better because, I mean, it is, it’s their company as well,” he said.
Even through the life-changing event, he’s staying humble.
As an immigrant, Hernandez said he was taught to work hard, something his newfound wealth won’t get in the way of. He said he plans to keep working and pass on the lessons he’s learned to his children.
He’s now teaching his three kids, including his 16-year-old daughter, how to invest based on what he learned owning SpaceX stock. His daughter is already a stakeholder in Meta and a handful of other companies.
“She’s a little entrepreneur herself,” he said.
If given the chance to talk to Musk, Hernandez said he’d thank him for helping him realize a dream he didn’t know he had.
“He made it a possibility for somebody like us, you know, the cook or … electrician,” he said. “He’s making all these lives much better and meaningful for their families as well.”

In November, Jeff Bezos announced that he would become co-CEO of a new startup called Prometheus. At the time, the startup said it would focus on “physical AI”—an increasingly common term for applying the same deep learning principles behind large language models or generative AI to things like robotics and manufacturing—but specifics were scarce. Now, with a major new round of funding, Bezos and co-founder Vik Bajaj have talked about it in slightly more detail.
The funding round is significant—$12 billion now, after an initial round of $6.2 billion last year, for a valuation of $41 billion. The funding comes from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, and others, plus a sizable amount from Bezos’ coffers. The startup currently employs 150 people.
Much of that funding will be put toward buying compute. “O ne of the reasons we’ve had to raise a significant amount of funding is because… what we’re doing is very compute-intensive and we need to create that data,” Bezos told CNBC.
So what exactly are they doing? Bezos summarized a significant portion of the company’s focus as creating an “artificial general engineer.”
“All societal wealth is driven by invention,” Bezos told The New York Times. “Six thousand years ago, somebody invented the plow, and we all got wealthier. Then, much later, somebody invented the steam engine, and we all got wealthier.” He went on to say that “what Prometheus seeks to do is to offer a set of tools that dramatically accelerates that invention loop.”
Speaking to CNBC, he used the same examples but described the company’s goal in loftier terms. He said the objective is to produce technological breakthroughs that will produce “civilizational wealth,” not just wealth for a single individual or company.
Bajaj described the team’s goals in slightly more pragmatic terms. He said designing new technologies “takes a thousand human minds creatively working together” and is “one of the most complex things we do as a species.” He added that the engineers behind those breakthroughs “use tools that really haven’t changed for decades. Part of what we want to do is arm them with tools that allow them to come up with those designs much more quickly.”
A couple of months ago, The New York Times reported that Bezos and Bajaj are working to raise a $100 billion investment fund to go into companies that could leverage and benefit directly from what Prometheus may produce. That could include some of Bezos’ own other ventures, such as Blue Origin.
It’s still early for Prometheus, and no specific new products or technologies have been announced. Prometheus is not operating in a vacuum, either. There are numerous other startups exploring AI’s applications in the physical world, from training world models to drive policies for robotics, to overhauling manufacturing with more robust and capable automation. With this round, though, Prometheus has a significant funding advantage over most competitors.

Elon Musk has become the first person to cross the trillionaire threshold, at least on paper, after SpaceX priced its blockbuster initial public offering at $135 a share and its stock soared in its stock market debut.
Before the IPO, Musk was worth an estimated $813 billion, a fortune more than twice as large as the planet’s second-richest person, Google co-founder Larry Page, who is worth an estimated $288 billion, according to Forbes.
SpaceX formally setting its stock price at $135 boosted Musk’s fortune to just over $1 trillion. The shares, which will trade under the ticker symbol SPCX, jumped after they began trading shortly before noon ET. At its intraday high of $168.75 on Friday, Musk’s net worth reached roughly $1.18 trillion, although future declines could push him back below the trillionaire mark.
While billionaire wealth alone may be hard enough to comprehend, a trillionaire represents a level of wealth that rivals the economic output of the world’s biggest nations. Only 19 countries have GDPs that surpass $1 trillion, ranging from the U.S. to the Netherlands, according to World Bank data.
Musk’s surging fortune represents a “new Gilded Age” of wealth inequality, Oxfam America senior director of economic justice Nabil Ahmed said in a statement.
“Elon Musk’s rise to trillionaire status marks a new pinnacle of oligarchy,” Ahmed said.
To be sure, plenty of other SpaceX employees and investors are likely to mint new fortunes with the IPO. About 4,400 SpaceX workers could become millionaires when the stock begins trading, according to the New York Times. But Musk is likely to be the biggest beneficiary, given his large stake in the business.
Trillionaire math
Musk owns 4.8 billion shares of SpaceX, or about 42% of the company, as well as 350 million stock options exercisable at $8.39 per share, according to the company’s IPO filing. At $135 a share, Musk’s stake is worth $648 billion. His options add another $44.3 billion to his net worth.
Because Forbes valued Musk’s pre-IPO stake in SpaceX at $500 billion, the IPO sale boosts the value of his SpaceX shares by an additional $192.3 billion, bringing his total net worth to $1.005 trillion.
SpaceX shares touched as high as $168.75 in Friday afternoon trading. At that price, Musk’s stake in SpaceX is worth an additional $366.1 billion, placing his total wealth at roughly $1.18 billion.
That wealth makes Musk richer than the bottom 46% of the world’s population, or a combined 3.8 billion people, Oxfam said.

Elon Musk is officially the world’s first trillionaire after his SpaceX tech company debuted Friday at $150/share, 11% higher than the company’s IPO pricing.
SpaceX — rocket manufacturer, satellite internet service provider, AI firm and owner of X (aka Twitter) all rolled into one — had already officially set a record for the biggest IPO in history with its initial stock pricing. On Thursday it confirmed the pricing of its IPO of 555.6 million shares of its Class A common stock, at a public offering price of $135.00/share. That gave it a valuation of around $1.77 trillion and the company raised about $75 billion from the IPO.
Shares of the company, which is officially “Space Exploration Technologies Corp.,” began trading Friday at around 11:50 a.m. ET on the Nasdaq Global Select Market and Nasdaq Texas exchanges under the symbol “SPCX.” The stock shot up over $160/share, pushing its market cap over $2 trillion. As of 1 p.m. ET, shares had hit $174.00/share, up nearly 29% from the IPO price.
With the SpaceX IPO, Musk — already the world’s wealthiest individual — has captured trillionaire status. As of Thursday afternoon, Musk’s net worth stood at about $795 billion, accounting for his holdings in Tesla, SpaceX and other companies, according to Forbes. As of midday Friday, Musk’s net worth had popped to an estimated $1.1 trillion, per the New York Times.
Musk is founder, chairman, CEO and chief technical officer of SpaceX. Post-IPO, Musk’s voting control of SpaceX will be “north of 82%” but he is not permitted to sell shares in the company for one year, per CNBC.
Prior to SpaceX’s shares public debut, Musk in Texas helped “ring” Nasdaq’s opening bell Friday. “It is certainly hard to believe that a little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public with the largest IPO ever,” Musk commented.
SpaceX’s debut in the public market comes ahead IPOs expected later this year for two AI heavyweights: Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which recently filed confidential paperwork with the SEC for initial public offerings of their own with dates for those IPOs yet to be announced.
The early surge for SpaceX’s IPO shows strong demand among investors to own a piece of the AI-fueled company. Still, some analysts have identified concerns with the tech conglomerate’s lofty valuation given its current financials.
In a June 8 report, research firm Morningstar put a fair-value estimate of $63/share on SpaceX (with a valuation in the neighborhood of $830 billion). Even that assumes favorable outcomes of two unproven technologies: a rapidly reusable Starship upper stage and commercially scalable and competitive orbital AI data centers. “We expect neither of these technological questions to be answered before 2028, even in the most optimistic scenario,” Morningstar analysts led by Nicholas Owens wrote.
Meanwhile, whereas SpaceX claimed Starlink’s global addressable market was a whopping $1.6 trillion, Morningstar estimates it at less than 10% of that: $129 billion globally. The analysts project 7.5x revenue growth for Starlink to $85 billion by 2035, supported by “niche broadband, enterprise use cases, and carrier partnerships.”
SpaceX’s IPO valuation was substantially higher than previous high-profile tech IPOs — roughly 94 times revenue, the Morningstar analysts pointed out (compared with, for example, Meta at 22x and Amazon at 18x). The IPO valuation implied that the company’s 2035 earnings before interest and taxes would have to grow 75-fold from 2025 levels.
In 2025, the company’s xAI segment — which includes X — posted a $6.36 billion operating loss (vs. a $1.56 billion loss a year earlier) on $3.2 billion in revenue (up 22%). For the first three months of 2026, capital expenditures for the AI business came in at $7.7 billion. That represents a significant acceleration from $12.7 billion in capex for full-year 2025.