HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT Reportedly Cited Fraudulent Cruise Hotline, Allegedly Enabling Successful Scam

August 15, 2025

Google's AI Overviews reportedly revealed a fraudulent customer service number for Royal Caribbean, which was also found on ChatGPT results. User Alex Rivlin called the number, fell victim to an impostor, and ended up with $768 in unauthorized charges. This incident suggests that scammers may be manipulating AI outputs to perpetuate longstanding hotline scams.

For those interested in promoting harm prevention through responsible AI governance and safe practices, JOIN US or learn more about HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM's role in managing such incidents.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
unknown-scammers, unknown-scammers-impersonating-royal-caribbean, unknown-scammers-impersonating-disney-cruise-line, unknown-scammers-impersonating-princess-cruises
Alleged developer
google, openai
Alleged harmed parties
alex-rivlin, royal-caribbean, royal-caribbean-customers, disney-cruise-line, disney-cruise-line-customers, princess-cruises, princess-cruises-customers, general-public

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1187

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.