Cybersecurity researchers are warning of a “widespread and ongoing” SMS phishing marketing campaign that is been focusing on toll street customers in america for monetary theft since mid-October 2024.
“The toll street smishing assaults are being carried out by a number of financially motivated menace actors utilizing the smishing equipment developed by ‘Wang Duo Yu,'” Cisco Talos researchers Azim Khodjibaev, Chetan Raghuprasad, and Joey Chen assessed with average confidence.
The phishing campaigns, per the corporate, impersonate U.S. digital toll assortment methods like E-ZPass, sending SMS messages and Apple iMessages to people throughout Washington, Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Texas, Ohio, Illinois, and Kansas about an unpaid toll and clicking on a pretend hyperlink despatched within the chat.
It is price noting some points of the toll phishing marketing campaign have been beforehand highlighted by safety journalist Brian Krebs in January 2025, with the exercise traced again to a China-based SMS phishing service referred to as Lighthouse that is marketed on Telegram.
Whereas Apple iMessage mechanically disables hyperlinks in messages acquired from unknown senders, the smishing texts urge recipients to reply with “Y” so as to activate the hyperlink – a tactic noticed in phishing kits like Darcula and Xiū gǒu.
Ought to the sufferer click on on the hyperlink and go to the area, they’re prompted to unravel a pretend image-based CAPTCHA problem, after which they’re redirected to a pretend E-ZPass web page (e.g., “ezp-va[.lcom” or “e-zpass[.]com-etcjr[.]xin”) the place they’re requested to enter their title and ZIP code to entry the invoice.
Targets are then requested to proceed additional to make the fee on one other fraudulent web page, at which level all of the entered private and monetary info is siphoned to the menace actors.
Talos famous that a number of menace actors are working the toll street smishing campaigns by seemingly making use of a phishing equipment developed by Wang Duo Yu, and that it has noticed comparable smishing kits being utilized by one other Chinese language organized cybercrime group often known as the Smishing Triad.
Curiously, Wang Duo Yu can be alleged to be the creator of the phishing kits utilized by Smishing Triad, per safety researcher Grant Smith. “The creator is a present laptop science scholar in China who’s utilizing the abilities he is studying to make a fairly penny on the aspect,” Smith revealed in an intensive evaluation in August 2024.
Smishing Triad is identified for conducting large-scale smishing assaults focusing on postal providers in a minimum of 121 nations, utilizing failed package deal supply lures to coax message recipients into clicking on bogus hyperlinks that request their private and monetary info below the guise of a supposed service charge for redelivery.
Moreover, menace actors utilizing these kits have tried to enroll victims’ card particulars right into a cell pockets, permitting them to additional money out their funds at scale utilizing a method often known as Ghost Faucet.
The phishing kits have additionally been discovered to be backdoored in that the captured credit score/debit card info can be exfiltrated to the creators, a method often known as double theft.
“Wang Duo Yu has crafted and designed particular smishing kits and has been promoting entry to those kits on their Telegram channels,” Talos mentioned. “The kits can be found with completely different infrastructure choices, priced at US $50 every for a full-feature growth, $30 every for proxy growth (when the shopper has a private area and server), $20 every for model updates, and $20 for all different miscellaneous assist.”
As of March 2025, the e-crime group is believed to have targeted their efforts on a brand new Lighthouse phishing equipment that is geared in direction of harvesting credentials from banks and monetary organizations in Australia and the Asia-Pacific area, in keeping with Silent Push.
The menace actors additionally declare to have “300+ entrance desk workers worldwide” to assist varied points of the fraud and cash-out schemes related to the phishing equipment.
“Smishing Triad can be promoting its phishing kits to different maliciously aligned menace actors through Telegram and sure different channels,” the corporate mentioned. “These gross sales make it tough to attribute the kits to anybody subgroup, so the websites are at the moment all attributed right here below the Smishing Triad umbrella.”
In a report printed final month, PRODAFT revealed that Lighthouse shares tactical overlaps with phishing kits comparable to Lucid and Darcula, and that it operates independently of the XinXin group, the cybercrime group behind the Lucid equipment. The Swiss cybersecurity firm is monitoring Wang Duo Yu (aka Lao Wang) as LARVA-241.
“An evaluation of assaults performed utilizing the Lucid and Darcula panels revealed that Lighthouse (Lao Wang / Wang Duo Yu) shares vital similarities with the XinXin group when it comes to focusing on, touchdown pages, and area creation patterns,” PRODAFT famous.
Cybersecurity firm Resecurity, which was the primary to doc Smishing Triad in 2023 and has additionally been monitoring the rip-off toll campaigns, mentioned the smishing syndicate has used over 60,000 domains, making it difficult for Apple and Google to dam the fraudulent exercise in an efficient method.
“Utilizing underground bulk SMS providers permits cybercriminals to scale their operations, focusing on thousands and thousands of customers concurrently,” Resecurity mentioned. “These providers permit attackers to effectively ship 1000’s or thousands and thousands of fraudulent IM messages, focusing on customers individually or teams of customers primarily based on particular demographics throughout varied areas.”
