Google sues cybercriminal group behind E-ZPass, USPS text phishing scams

In this article

filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against a foreign cybercriminal group behind a massive SMS phishing, or “smishing,” operation.

Dubbed by some cyber researchers as the “Smishing Triad,” the organization, which Google said is largely based out of China, uses a phishing-as-a-service kit named “Lighthouse” to create and deploy attacks using fraudulent texts.

The crime group has amassed over a million victims across 120 countries, Google said in a release.

“They were preying on users’ trust in reputable brands such as E-ZPass, the U.S. Postal Service, and even us as Google,” Google general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado told CNBC. “The ‘Lighthouse’ enterprise or software creates a bunch of templates in which you create fake websites to pull users’ information.”