{"id":352679,"date":"2025-11-16T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-16T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/es\/?p=401841"},"modified":"2025-11-16T08:00:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-16T16:00:09","slug":"google-has-just-sued-the-chinese-hacker-group-that-stole-1-billion-dollars-from-millions-of-its-users","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/google-has-just-sued-the-chinese-hacker-group-that-stole-1-billion-dollars-from-millions-of-its-users\/","title":{"rendered":"Google has just sued the Chinese hacker group that stole 1 billion dollars from millions of its users"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Google has sued &#8220;Lighthouse Enterprise,&#8221; a major global fraudulent operation from China that facilitated the theft of millions of credit cards and hundreds of millions of dollars.<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In a federal lawsuit recently filed in the Southern District of New York, <strong>Google revealed its plans to sue a group of foreign criminals<\/strong> for carrying out <a href=\"https:\/\/www.softonic.com\/articulos\/el-peligro-de-tener-muchas-pestanas-abiertas-en-el-ordenador-y-movil-la-policia-no-lo-aconseja\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"a massive phishing operation\">a massive phishing operation<\/a> as a service (PhaaS).<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>According to the lawsuit, the group created and sold a phishing kit called Lighthouse<\/strong>, which even allowed novice criminals to create fake websites that imitated trusted institutions. The kit, advertised through Telegram and YouTube, offered hundreds of templates and pre-made tools to launch large-scale smishing and e-commerce scams, and allowed users to create fake websites that impersonated government agencies, financial corporations, and, among others, Google.<\/p>\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">\ud83d\udcbb Google sued a Chinese hacker group that runs a phishing service called Lighthouse.<br><br>It tricked over 1 million people in 120 countries and made more than $1 billion using fake Google and USPS pages.<br><br>They sold the phishing kits \u2014 $88 a week to $1,588 a year.<br><br>Read more \u2192\u2026 <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/AeuJMkSIoP\">pic.twitter.com\/AeuJMkSIoP<\/a><\/p>&mdash; The Hacker News (@TheHackersNews) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/TheHackersNews\/status\/1988635214772666681?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 12, 2025<\/a><\/blockquote><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Google has sued them for using the company&#8217;s logo and its identity<\/h2>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Google claims that, in a period of 20 days, <strong>the Lighthouse platform was used to create 200,000 fake websites<\/strong>, which targeted more than a million victims in 121 countries.<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Citing researchers, <strong>Google estimates that between 12.7 and 115 million credit cards in the United States may have been compromised<\/strong> through Lighthouse-driven attacks.<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The exact number of people involved in the operation is unknown. In the lawsuit, the individuals are labeled as &#8220;Doe&#8221; 1-25, although Google acknowledged that the actual number of people is likely much higher.<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In some cases, <strong>criminals created fake text messages about the delivery of USPS packages or alerted victims about pending toll payments.<\/strong> Sometimes, they created fake online stores that stole users&#8217; payment data and often used the stolen information to charge victims&#8217; credit cards in digital wallets and make unauthorized payments.<\/p>\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Google is suing 25 people it alleges are behind a \u201crelentless\u201d scam text operation that uses a phishing-as-a-service platform called Lighthouse. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/xbHjwijp2L\">https:\/\/t.co\/xbHjwijp2L<\/a><\/p>&mdash; WIRED (@WIRED) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/WIRED\/status\/1988549216713490902?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 12, 2025<\/a><\/blockquote><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Google claims that Lighthouse operators misused Google logos and trademarks<\/strong>, published ads through Google Ads, and even uploaded tutorials to YouTube showing how to carry out the scams.<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Hackers damaged Google&#8217;s reputation, violated its terms of service, and forced it to spend hundreds of hours investigating and shutting down fraudulent accounts, the company concluded.<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>By the way, this is not the first time Google has sued Chinese citizens for cyber crimes<\/strong>, but most of the time the lawsuits lead to nothing, as China rarely extradites its citizens to the United States, especially when it comes to cyber crimes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Google has sued &#8220;Lighthouse Enterprise,&#8221; a major global fraudulent operation from China that facilitated the theft of millions of credit cards and hundreds of millions of dollars. In a federal lawsuit recently filed in the Southern District of New York, Google revealed its plans to sue a group of foreign criminals for carrying out a massive phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) operation. According to the lawsuit, the group created and sold a phishing kit called Lighthouse, which allowed even novice criminals to create fake websites that mimicked trusted institutions. The kit, advertised [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9265,"featured_media":352680,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","wpcf-pageviews":0},"categories":[1015],"tags":[5605,1068],"usertag":[],"vertical":[],"content-category":[],"class_list":["post-352679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-ciberseguridad","tag-google"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352679"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":352684,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352679\/revisions\/352684"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/352680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352679"},{"taxonomy":"usertag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/usertag?post=352679"},{"taxonomy":"vertical","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/vertical?post=352679"},{"taxonomy":"content-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/content-category?post=352679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}