Phishing Campaign Sends Millions of Emails Using Invisible Unicode to Evade Filters

A large-scale phishing campaign is using invisible Unicode tag characters (special code points that don't display on screen) to split up financial keywords like 'funding' so email filters cannot recognize them, while the text still appears normal to people reading it. This technique, called ASCII smuggling (hiding messages using invisible characters), adapts AI-era evasion methods to traditional phishing attacks and affected millions of emails between February and May 2026.