{
 "public_id": "AIR-2025-0098",
 "incident_id": "2025-08-google-ai-overviews-fraudulent-hotline",
 "date_disclosed": "2025-08-15",
 "date_occurred": "2025",
 "title": "Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT surfaced a scammer's cruise-line support number as the official one, and a user who called it was defrauded",
 "class": "in_the_wild",
 "attack_surface": "consumer_chatbot",
 "initial_vector": "search_result_poisoning",
 "agent_capability_abused": [
  "retrieval",
  "web_grounding",
  "answer_synthesis"
 ],
 "target_product": "Google AI Overviews; ChatGPT",
 "target_vendor": "Google / OpenAI",
 "autonomy_level": "assistant",
 "impact_realized": true,
 "impact_type": [
  "financial_loss",
  "integrity_violation"
 ],
 "blast_radius": "one named victim charged $768; the same poisoned number surfaced for Royal Caribbean, Disney and Princess cruise queries",
 "cve": [],
 "taxonomy": {
  "owasp_asi": [
   "ASI02",
   "ASI09"
  ],
  "mitre_atlas": [],
  "labels": [
   "retrieval_poisoning",
   "trust_laundering",
   "seo_attack_adapted",
   "named_victim",
   "answer_without_provenance"
  ]
 },
 "defense_present": "Google's spam and quality systems for the underlying index",
 "defense_bypassed": true,
 "fix_shipped": "undisclosed",
 "primary_sources": [
  "https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/08/15/google-ai-overviews-scam/",
  "https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1187"
 ],
 "verified_quote": "Consumer Alex Rivlin reportedly called the number, spoke with an impostor, and provided his credit card, later incurring $768 in fraudulent charges.",
 "confidence": "high",
 "notes": "The clearest realized-harm case for retrieval poisoning in the corpus. Hotline scams are decades old; what changed is that the AI layer stripped the provenance cues — no domain, no ranking, no visible source — and reissued the attacker's number as a direct answer in Google's own voice. Reported by the Washington Post. Verified quote is the AI Incident Database's own summary. AI Incident Database incident 1187.",
 "risk_category": "security_fraud",
 "risk_secondary": [
  "product_misuse"
 ],
 "risk_subcategory": "Unauthorized financial commitment",
 "risk_sub_secondary": [],
 "ai_entity": "generative",
 "agency": "human_acted_on_output",
 "agency_debatable": false,
 "agency_reason": "the AI surfaced the scam number; the user called it and was defrauded",
 "vector_family": "other",
 "vector_detail": "search_result_poisoning",
 "guardrail_kind": [
  "unknown"
 ],
 "guardrail_outcome": "silent",
 "xrefs": {
  "aiid": [
   1187
  ],
  "atlas": [],
  "cve": [],
  "ghsa": []
 },
 "primary_asi": "ASI02",
 "agent_framework": "robotaxi_stack",
 "model_provider": "multiple",
 "model_name": "",
 "detection_mechanism": "unknown",
 "tool_access": "unknown",
 "financial_loss_band": "unknown",
 "eai_category": "unsafe_actuation",
 "eai_domain": "agent_behaviour",
 "eai_secondary": [
  "confused_deputy"
 ],
 "eai_reason": "subcategory: Unauthorized financial commitment",
 "asi_curated": [],
 "asi_scope": "in_scope",
 "asi_provenance": "rule",
 "asi_reason": "ASI02 (eai_category=unsafe_actuation); ASI09 (agency=human_acted_on_output + reliance signal)",
 "submitted_by": "EAI Internal"
}