Google AI Overview Could Fool You Here’s how to stay safe

These days, instead Instead of showing you a traditional list of links when you run a search query, Google is intent on presenting an AI overview instead: composite summaries of information scraped from the web, adding some word prediction magic, and piecing it together in a way that appears as accurate and reliable as possible.

We’ve written before about some of the issues with AI overviews, which regularly contain errors or nonsense, and of course steal the work of human writers who already know the answers to the questions you ask Google. But there’s another problem: these AI answers can actually be dangerous.

As with every other new technology throughout history, scams are now making their way into AI Overviews as well, seemingly injecting Google’s AI answers with fraudulent phone numbers that you shouldn’t trust. Here’s what’s happening and how you can make sure you stay safe.

How Scams Work in Artificial Intelligence Overview

It’s a good idea not to trust AI to get contact details.David Nield

Both The Washington Post and Digital Trends have observed instances of scam support numbers appearing in Google AI Overviews, which were reported on Facebook and Reddit, respectively. Credit unions and banks are also warning their customers about these scams.

It doesn’t seem to be a completely new problem, but the way Google search works now has been given a new twist.

Here’s what happens: The hapless victim searches the company name on Google for a contact number, then calls the number provided by the AI. This does not actually lead to the company in question, but rather to someone posing as that company, who then attempts to take payment information or other sensitive details from the caller.

It’s not clear exactly how these fake numbers are planted, but the best guess is that they are posted in several inconspicuous places online, alongside the names of major companies. Then, AI Overviews comes along and picks it up, without doing the proper checks to verify the information.

Of course, the planting of misleading phone numbers by bad actors does not pose an entirely new danger; Misinformation has been a part of the web for a very long time. But the design of AI Overviews, which culls information from the web and presents it as fact rather than encouraging you to do the research yourself, makes people more vulnerable to this type of deception.