Using AI to stop tech support scams in Chrome security.googleblog.com/2025/05/u…

ech support scams are an increasingly prevalent form of cybercrime, characterized by deceptive tactics aimed at extorting money or gaining unauthorized access to sensitive data. In a tech support scam, the goal of the scammer is to trick you into believing your computer has a serious problem, such as a virus or malware infection, and then convince you to pay for unnecessary services, software, or grant them remote access to your device. Tech support scams on the web often employ alarming pop-up warnings mimicking legitimate security alerts. We’ve also observed them to use full-screen takeovers and disable keyboard and mouse input to create a sense of crisis.

Chrome has always worked with Google Safe Browsing to help keep you safe online. Now, with this week’s launch of Chrome 137, Chrome will offer an additional layer of protection using the on-device Gemini Nano large language model (LLM). This new feature will leverage the LLM to generate signals that will be used by Safe Browsing in order to deliver higher confidence verdicts about potentially dangerous sites like tech support scams.