Cybersecurity researchers are warning of a “widespread and ongoing” SMS phishing marketing campaign that is been concentrating on toll street customers in the US for monetary theft since mid-October 2024.
“The toll street smishing assaults are being carried out by a number of financially motivated risk actors utilizing the smishing equipment 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 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 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 robotically disables hyperlinks in messages acquired from unknown senders, the smishing texts urge recipients to reply with “Y” as a way 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 data is siphoned to the risk actors.
Talos famous that a number of risk actors are working the toll street smishing campaigns by doubtless 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 generally 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 pc science pupil 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 recognized for conducting large-scale smishing assaults concentrating on postal providers in at the very least 121 international locations, utilizing failed package deal supply lures to coax message recipients into clicking on bogus hyperlinks that request their private and monetary data underneath the guise of a supposed service price 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 method generally known as Ghost Faucet.
The phishing kits have additionally been discovered to be backdoored in that the captured credit score/debit card data can be exfiltrated to the creators, a method generally 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 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 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 the direction of harvesting credentials from banks and monetary organizations in Australia and the Asia-Pacific area, in line with Silent Push.
The risk actors additionally declare to have “300+ entrance desk employees worldwide” to assist numerous 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 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 the moment all attributed right here underneath the Smishing Triad umbrella.”
In a report printed 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 equipment. 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 when it comes to 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, 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 permits cybercriminals to scale their operations, concentrating on tens of millions of customers concurrently,” Resecurity stated. “These providers permit attackers to effectively ship hundreds or tens of millions of fraudulent IM messages, concentrating on customers individually or teams of customers based mostly on particular demographics throughout numerous areas.”
