Google recently filed a lawsuit against Lighthouse, a phishing services platform operating inside China that sells its services to criminal rings running online scams. The group, known as Lighthouse Enterprise, advertises its capabilities on forums, YouTube channels, and Telegram, while also using these to recruit and train people and develop its offerings. Scammers then use them to run campaigns that impersonate trusted names like Gmail, YouTube, the New York City government, and the United States Postal Service to compromise user information. According to The Financial Times, the tech giant hopes to utilize U.S. racketeering and computer fraud laws to take down the websites, domains, and servers that power the illicit operations.
“Criminals are leveraging the trust and reputation of our brand to lure users into unsafe phishing attacks. The ability to put our engineers and lawyers to work to actually fight on behalf of those users is a necessary thing to do,” Google general counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado told the publication. “It becomes a little bit of a game of whack-a-mole, but we’re actually able to identify the offenders and go after them individually. It should provide a pretty decent ripple effect of a deterrent…by continuing to do this, we make certain types of phishing attacks less desirable.”
When a criminal engages the services of Lighthouse, they select a fake website template from a list of hundreds created by a developer group that will help sell their scam. From there, a data group would buy or get data that contains victim information, after which a spammer group will start hitting these potential targets, sending millions of text messages with links to the fake sites. The victims would then enter their credentials into the web pages, and it’s up to the would-be scammer if they want to use the information to steal from their account or simply collate and sell them to another criminal individual or enterprise. According to the report, Google claims the group has trapped 1 million people with its operation in 121 countries, stealing $1 billion in the process.
While Google seems to be targeting individual scammers, taking down the services behind them would greatly hamper their operations. However, given how lucrative these illegal operations could be and the number of personnel involved, this will likely be a rather difficult task. Because even if they take down the entire Lighthouse Enterprise organization, it’s likely that a new one would simply surface from the dark corners of the web and offer its own illegal service to replace the old one.
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