Tech giant, Google, said it has filed a lawsuit against groups of unnamed scammers using a fake version of its AI tool, Bard, to lure people into downloading malware.
The company’s General Counsel, Halimah DeLaine Prado, announced this via a blog post on Monday. According to her, these fake Bard AI tools are being downloaded globally, whereas the real Google Bard does not require any download.
In a lawsuit filed in the Northern District of California, Google claimed the scammers set up social media accounts encouraging people to download a fake version of Bard.
When users downloaded the file, it installed malicious software onto their devices, allowing the scammers to access their social media accounts.
Leveraging excitement around AI
While noting that the fraudsters are taking advantage of the general excitement around AI to scam people, DeLaine Prado in the blog post said:
“As public excitement in new generative AI tools has increased, scammers are increasingly taking advantage of unsuspecting users. Our first lawsuit targets bad actors who misled numerous people worldwide looking to use Google’s AI tools into unknowingly downloading malware. The fraudsters created social media pages and ran ads encouraging people to “download” Bard, our freely available generative AI tool that does not need to be downloaded. The ads instead led people to download malware that compromised their social media accounts. Since April, we have filed roughly 300 takedowns related to this group of bad actors.
“We are seeking an order to stop the scammers from setting up domains like these and allow us to have them disabled with U.S. domain registrars. If this is successful, it will serve as a deterrent and provide a clear mechanism for preventing similar scams in the future.”
Copyright scam
Google also filed another lawsuit against fraudsters, who they allege set up dozens of Google accounts and used them to submit thousands of false copyright claims against their competitors.
That suit also filed in the Northern District of California, claims that two individuals have created at least 65 Google accounts to submit thousands of fraudulent notices of copyright infringement against more than 117,000 websites.
“More broadly, we hope these efforts protect and preserve the unprecedented culture of innovation in the United States. Just as A.I. fraudsters and copyright scammers hope to fly under the radar we believe that appropriate legal action and working with government officials puts scammers squarely in the crosshairs of justice, promoting a safer internet for everyone,” DeLaine Prado said.
According to Google’s General Counsel, the lawsuits are an effective tool for establishing a legal precedent, disrupting the tools used by scammers, and raising the consequences for bad actors.
