Online fraud is very disruptive and can have a painful financial and emotional impact on people. Google is committed to tackling this challenge head on. As part of this effort, experts from across government, technology, consumer groups and academia are gathering in Zurich for the second EMEA Anti-Scams and Fraud Summit, hosted by the Google Safety Engineering Center (GSEC). The goal is simple but ambitious: Empower the collective action needed to disrupt today’s sophisticated fraud.
To support this mission, we build AI-powered protection into the products you use every day, and we collaborate across the industry and with authorities to stay ahead of fraudsters. Here are five ways we work to protect you from fraud and scams:
1. Using AI-powered tools as the first line of defense
While fraudsters use AI for malicious purposes, we use it for good. Long before a scam reaches you, our AI-powered defenses work to block it:
- We stop more than 99.9% of spam, phishing and malware from reaching your Gmail inbox and block nearly 15 billion unwanted emails every day.
- In Chrome, we predict and block dangerous websites in real time; while in Search, we filter out hundreds of millions of spam pages daily to ensure your results are 99% spam-free.
- By 2025, our systems caught over 99% of policy-violating ads before they reached a person, and we blocked or removed over 8.3 billion ads, including 602 million ads linked to fraud.
- On-device AI powers “Scam Detection” in Phone by Google, alerting users in real-time to conversation patterns typical of fraudsters.
2. Gives you security tools
In addition to our automated protections, we provide you with easy-to-use tools to control your own security and spot fraud in the moment. Security Check helps you quickly strengthen your account security by enabling protections like access keys and 2-step verification. And with Circle to Search on Android, you can long-press your home button and circle a suspicious text message. Our systems will use AI to assess whether it is a likely scam and provide guidance. (You can do the same on any phone by taking a screenshot and using Google Lens.)
3. Building resilience through education and awareness
Empowering people with knowledge is one of the most effective ways to help develop the critical thinking skills to spot fraud.
- Our Be Scam Ready initiative is an interactive, game-based program that helps you learn the tactics scammers use. By safely simulating real-world fraud, this “learn-by-doing” approach has been shown to create better resilience compared to traditional awareness campaigns. Be Scam Ready is available in English, Portuguese, Thai and Traditional Chinese, and will launch in more languages ​​later this year, including French, Spanish and Arabic.
- Following our $5 million Google.org commitment at last year’s summit to fight fraud in Europe and the Middle East, grantees Internet Society (ISOC) and Oxford Information Labs (OXIL) are rolling out grassroots training programs with the goal of protecting over 7 million vulnerable individuals and equipping thousands of frontline workers with scam resilience tools.
- We also regularly publish fraud and scam alerts on new trends, such as online job scams or fake package delivery notifications.
4. Sharing threat data to disrupt fraud at the source
To stop fraudsters who operate across multiple platforms and countries, we need to work together. One of the most effective solutions for cross-sector collaboration is the Global Signal Exchange (GSE), which acts as a global clearinghouse for threat data that helps identify and disrupt fraud before it causes harm. As a founding partner of GSE, Google both draws from and delivers unique threat intelligence to the platform, while our AI models analyze the signals to uncover hidden patterns that inform investigations and enforcement actions. GSE now stores over 1.2 billion signals and has a real-world impact that helps disrupt criminal operations.
5. Cooperation on dismantling criminal networks
Eliminating fraud requires a joint approach that cuts across the public and private sectors. Here’s what we do:
- We work directly with law enforcement agencies, such as the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), to disrupt fraudulent activity. Thanks to signals shared by the NCA through the GSE, our teams were recently able to identify and disrupt a fraud network from West Africa.
- We are a signatory to the Industry Accord Against Online Scams and Fraud, an agreement between online industry players to share our collective expertise and resources.
- We take direct legal action to hold bad actors accountable. We’ve filed lawsuits against major scam operations like Lighthouse, a Phishing-as-a-Service network that shut down the day after we sued, and the operators of the BadBox botnet.
Stopping fraudsters is a dynamic, ongoing effort – and one we are fully committed to. By combining advanced artificial intelligence with broad collaboration, we can build a safer internet for everyone. Visit our Security Center to learn more about how we protect you and get tips for staying safe online.