Cybersecurity researchers are warning of a “widespread and ongoing” SMS phishing marketing campaign that is been focusing on toll highway customers in america for monetary theft since mid-October 2024.
“The toll highway smishing assaults are being carried out by a number of financially motivated risk actors utilizing the smishing package developed by ‘Wang Duo Yu,'” Cisco Talos researchers Azim Khodjibaev, Chetan Raghuprasad, and Joey Chen assessed with reasonable confidence.
The phishing campaigns, per the corporate, impersonate U.S. digital toll assortment programs 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 value noting some features 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 known as Lighthouse that is marketed on Telegram.
Whereas Apple iMessage robotically disables hyperlinks in messages obtained from unknown senders, the smishing texts urge recipients to reply with “Y” in an effort 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 cost on one other fraudulent web page, at which level all of the entered private and monetary data is siphoned to the risk actors.
Talos famous that a number of risk actors are working the toll highway smishing campaigns by doubtless making use of a phishing package developed by Wang Duo Yu, and that it has noticed comparable smishing kits being utilized by one other Chinese language organized cybercrime group referred to as the Smishing Triad.
Apparently, Wang Duo Yu can also be alleged to be the creator of the phishing kits utilized by Smishing Triad, per safety researcher Grant Smith. “The creator is a present pc science scholar in China who’s utilizing the talents he is studying to make a fairly penny on the facet,” Smith revealed in an intensive evaluation in August 2024.
Smishing Triad is recognized for conducting large-scale smishing assaults focusing on postal providers in a minimum of 121 international locations, utilizing failed bundle supply lures to coax message recipients into clicking on bogus hyperlinks that request their private and monetary data beneath the guise of a supposed service charge for redelivery.
Moreover, risk 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 way referred to as Ghost Faucet.
The phishing kits have additionally been discovered to be backdoored in that the captured credit score/debit card data can also be exfiltrated to the creators, a way referred to 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 stated. “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 help.”
As of March 2025, the e-crime group is believed to have targeted their efforts on a brand new Lighthouse phishing package that is geared in the direction of harvesting credentials from banks and monetary organizations in Australia and the Asia-Pacific area, in keeping with Silent Push.
The risk actors additionally declare to have “300+ entrance desk workers worldwide” to help numerous features of the fraud and cash-out schemes related to the phishing package.
“Smishing Triad can also be promoting its phishing kits to different maliciously aligned risk actors by way of Telegram and sure different channels,” the corporate stated. “These gross sales make it tough to attribute the kits to anybody subgroup, so the websites are at present all attributed right here beneath the Smishing Triad umbrella.”
In a report revealed final month, PRODAFT revealed that Lighthouse shares tactical overlaps with phishing kits similar to Lucid and Darcula, and that it operates independently of the XinXin group, the cybercrime group behind the Lucid package. The Swiss cybersecurity firm is monitoring Wang Duo Yu (aka Lao Wang) as LARVA-241.
“An evaluation of assaults carried out utilizing the Lucid and Darcula panels revealed that Lighthouse (Lao Wang / Wang Duo Yu) shares important similarities with the XinXin group by way of 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, stated 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 allows cybercriminals to scale their operations, focusing on hundreds of thousands of customers concurrently,” Resecurity stated. “These providers permit attackers to effectively ship 1000’s or hundreds of thousands of fraudulent IM messages, focusing on customers individually or teams of customers based mostly on particular demographics throughout numerous areas.”
