3 min readNew DelhiFeb 17, 2026 03:27 PM IST In 2024, Google introduced AI Overviews, a new feature that shows AI-generated summaries at the top of the search results instead of relevant links to websites from all over the internet.
AI Overviews are undoubtedly easy to read and give you quick access to information you were looking for, but these AI-generated summaries are known to be unreliable and full of mistakes.
While hallucination is still a big problem, a report by Wired suggests that threat actors are actively trying to hijack AI overviews to scam people out of their money.
For years, scammers have been pushing fake numbers into Google Search, which often show up instead of genuine numbers when you search for, say, a customer care or company number. However, with AI overviews now in the mix, the way Google Search works has created a new problem.
For example, when a user is searching for a company’s contact number on Google, AI Overviews might show a number which, instead of the company, might redirect users to a scammer pretending to work for the said company and try to steal payment or personal information.
As of now, it is still unclear how these numbers are being injected into AI Overviews, but the publication claims one way they may be popping up is because they are being published on several low-profile online websites with names of major companies.
When people use AI Overviews to do these specific searches, the feature summarises the information and the numbers without verifying them. It goes on to say that misleading phone numbers have been a problem for years, but the problem is the way AI Overviews shows the information as a fact makes users more vulnerable to such scams.Story continues below this ad
To stay safe from such scams, the simplest advice is not to believe every bit of information AI Overviews presents, but instead look up information yourself.
Google says it recently added several safeguards to improve scam detection in AI Overviews, but still encourages people to check numbers for authenticity by performing more searches.
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