Cybercriminals Reportedly Exploited Google’s G.Co Subdomain and Spoofed Caller ID in AI-Driven Phishing Attack on Hack Club Founder
Description
Hack Club founder Zach Latta was reportedly targeted in an AI-assisted phishing attack exploiting Google’s own systems. Cybercriminals allegedly spoofed a legitimate Google Assistant number and used voice cloning to impersonate support staff, claiming unusual login activity from Frankfurt. They reinforced the deception by sending a real email from Google’s Workspace domain. The attack, which relied on Google’s g.co subdomain, was thwarted when inconsistencies raised Latta’s suspicions.
Actors
Alleged Deployers
- voice-phishers
- scammers-impersonating-google-staff
- scammers
Alleged Developers
- synthetic-audio-generation-technology
Harmed Parties
- zach-latta
- google-users
Classification
Risk Domain
Malicious Actors & MisuseRisk Subdomain
4.3. Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation
MIT Risk Profile
Source
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Research Papers on This Topic
How Johnny Can Persuade LLMs to Jailbreak Them: Rethinking Persuasion to Challenge AI Safety by Humanizing LLMs
AgentHarm: A Benchmark for Measuring Harmfulness of LLM Agents
Regulating ChatGPT and other Large Generative AI Models
Great, Now Write an Article About That: The Crescendo Multi-Turn LLM Jailbreak Attack