Cybersecurity researchers are warning of a “widespread and ongoing” SMS phishing marketing campaign that is been concentrating 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 average 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 elements of the toll phishing marketing campaign had 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 routinely disables hyperlinks in messages acquired from unknown senders, the smishing texts urge recipients to reply with “Y” with a purpose 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 resolve 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 identify 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 info is siphoned to the risk actors.
Talos famous that a number of risk actors are working the toll highway smishing campaigns by probably 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.
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 reasonably penny on the facet,” Smith revealed in an intensive evaluation in August 2024.
Smishing Triad is recognized for conducting large-scale smishing assaults concentrating on postal companies in at the very least 121 nations, utilizing failed bundle 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 payment for redelivery.
Moreover, risk actors utilizing these kits have tried to enroll victims’ card particulars right into a cellular 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 info can 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 mentioned. “The kits can be found with totally different infrastructure choices, priced at US $50 every for a full-feature improvement, $30 every for proxy improvement (when the client 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 centered 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, based on Silent Push.
The risk actors additionally declare to have “300+ entrance desk employees worldwide” to help numerous elements of the fraud and cash-out schemes related to the phishing package.
“Smishing Triad can be promoting its phishing kits to different maliciously aligned risk actors through Telegram and certain different channels,” the corporate mentioned. “These gross sales make it troublesome to attribute the kits to anybody subgroup, so the websites are presently all attributed right here below the Smishing Triad umbrella.”
In a report revealed final month, PRODAFT revealed that Lighthouse shares tactical overlaps with phishing kits corresponding 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 performed utilizing the Lucid and Darcula panels revealed that Lighthouse (Lao Wang / Wang Duo Yu) shares important similarities with the XinXin group by way of concentrating 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 companies allows cybercriminals to scale their operations, concentrating on tens of millions of customers concurrently,” Resecurity mentioned. “These companies permit attackers to effectively ship 1000’s or tens of millions of fraudulent IM messages, concentrating on customers individually or teams of customers primarily based on particular demographics throughout numerous areas.”
