How Google protecting you from scams and fraud

Online fraud is highly disruptive, and can have a painful financial and emotional impact on people. Google is committed to tackling this challenge head-on. As part of that effort, this week, 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: Strengthen the collective action needed to disrupt today’s sophisticated scams.

To support this mission, we’re building AI-driven protections into the products you use every day and collaborating across the industry and with the authorities to stay ahead of fraudsters. Here are five ways we are working to keep you safer from scams and fraud:

1. Using AI-powered tools as the first line of defense

While scammers are using AI for nefarious purposes, we’re using it for good. Long before a scam reaches you, our AI-powered defenses are working to block it:

• Google stop more than 99.9% of spam, phishing and malware from reaching your Gmail inbox, blocking nearly 15 billion unwanted emails every day.
• In Chrome, we predict and block dangerous sites in real time; while in Search, we filter out hundreds of millions of spammy pages daily to ensure your results are 99% spam-free.
• In 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 associated with scams.
• On-device AI powers “Scam Detection” in Phone by Google, alerting users in real time to conversational patterns typical of scammers.

2. Enabling you with security tools

Beyond our automated protections, we give you easy-to-use tools to control your own security and spot scams in the moment. Security Checkup helps you quickly strengthen your account security by enabling protections like Passkeys 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’s 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 scams.

• Google Be Scam Ready initiative is an interactive, game-based program that helps you learn the tactics scammers use. By safely simulating real-world scams, this “learn-by-doing” approach has been proven to build better resilience compared to traditional awareness campaigns. Be Scam Ready is available in English, Portuguese, Thai, and Traditional Chinese and is launching in more languages later this year, including French, Spanish, and Arabic.
• Following our $5 million Google.org commitment at last year’s summit to combat scams 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 scams advisories about emerging trends, such as online job scams or fake package delivery notifications.

4. Sharing threat data to disrupt scams at the source

To stop scammers 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 helping to identify and disrupt scams, before they cause harm. As a founding partner of the GSE, Google both draws from and provides unique threat intelligence to the platform, while our AI models analyze the signals to uncover hidden patterns which inform investigations and enforcement actions. The GSE now stores over 1.2 billion signals and is having a real-world impact, helping to disrupt criminal operations.

5. Working together to take down criminal networks

Eliminating fraud requires a joint approach that extends across the public and private sectors. Here’s what we’re doing:

• Google  partner directly with law enforcement agencies, like the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), to disrupt fraud 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.
• Google  is a signatory to the Industry Accord Against Online Scams and Fraud, an agreement among online industry actors to share our collective expertise and resources.
• Google  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 scammers is a dynamic, ongoing effort – and one we are fully committed to. By combining advanced AI with broad collaboration, we can build a safer internet for everyone. To learn more about how we protect you and get tips for staying safe online, visit our Safety Center.