WIRED Roundup: DHS’s Privacy Breach, AI Romantic Affairs, and Google Sues Text Scammers

Zoë Schiffer: So shifting gears, our next story deals with another inescapable fact of modern life, which is scam text messages. Brian, how many scam texts or calls would you say you receive in a given week these days?

Brian Barrett: I mean, how many have I received during this recording? It is incessant, and that’s not even counting the political ones, which are legit but annoying. No, they are constant, Zoë. It is the most consistent communication I have in my life is from scammers.

Zoë Schiffer: Yes, same. So, we don’t really have a way to know for sure, but alongside millions of other Americans you might’ve been the target of a Chinese network of fraudsters called Lighthouse. Over the last few years, the group has sent millions of scam text messages, often impersonating USPS or a toll road collector, and reportedly they’ve made more than a billion dollars from their schemes. Our colleague, Matt Burgess, learned that Google filed a lawsuit this week in the United States suing 25 unnamed individuals who’ve allegedly operated as part of this scam network. The name of the group, Lighthouse, comes from the software that they sell to help fraudsters scam people. It’s developed by cyber criminals and sold, this really cracked me up, as a subscription service to less technically capable scammers. You can buy a weekly, monthly, seasonal, annual or permanent subscription. They’re running a professional operation over there.

Brian Barrett: Just make sure to turn off auto-renew in case you don’t want a—you don’t want to get that bill hitting you after the free trial.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, you really need to make sure there’s strong ROI before you commit.

Brian Barrett: Yeah. It is remarkable, and we’ve seen this in ransomware too, like the ransomware service. Now you’ve got scamming as a service. The level of professionalism to these operations, it shouldn’t surprise me, but it always does somehow. Google’s filing alleges that Lighthouse offers more than 600 phishing templates that scammers can use to try to steal people’s personal information. You can choose from more than 400 entities or organizations to impersonate. It’s really specific, it’s really sophisticated, and I think what’s interesting to me too here, Zoë, is these lawsuits always feel futile.