😺 Google sued the people spamming your phone
The Neuron · Eric Gerard Ruiz · 2026-06-16
The Neuron newsletter reports that Google sued a China-based cybercrime ring that used Gemini to mass-produce phishing sites at scale, alongside reports of the first confirmed autonomous drone battlefield deaths in Ukraine and Meta secretly embedding military facial recognition software on 50 million phones.
Appears in
Extraction
Topics: ai-misusephishing-scamsautonomous-weaponsfacial-recognitiongemini
Claims
- Google filed a lawsuit against Outsider Enterprise, a China-based cybercrime network that used Gemini to generate convincing phishing websites impersonating Google, YouTube, USPS, banks, and toll agencies.
- Outsider Enterprise sent 2.5 million scam texts in two weeks in May and is estimated to have caused $1.9 billion in losses since July 2023, with the FBI linking it to 3.87 million stolen credit card numbers.
- The group operated a phishing-as-a-service toolkit sold on Telegram for $88/week with 290+ pre-built templates, requiring no technical skill to deploy.
- Ukraine used fully autonomous AI-controlled drones to kill Russian soldiers in 2024, representing the first confirmed battlefield deaths from autonomous weapons.
- Meta secretly embedded dormant military-grade facial recognition software from Pentagon contractor Rank One in its AI app on 50 million phones, then deleted it the day after WIRED reported the story.
Key quotes
Before AI, building a convincing fake website took a coder and a few hours. Outsider Enterprise cut that to minutes, then sold the ability to anyone with $88 and a Telegram account.
Google suing them is the right call. But it's also a useful reminder that the same AI tools making your work faster are being rented out on Telegram for $88 a week to steal credit cards.
Apple quietly buried a feature in the iOS 27 developer beta that would let you swap out Siri's AI brain for ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini right from your Settings app, complete with a dedicated App Store section. The feature was never announced at WWDC. It was just...there, dormant, waiting.