Since November 2025, YY Lai Yu has offered more than 400 phishing templates to its customers, moving beyond generic banking lures to also target the digital lifestyle of Japanese residents. These templates included various Japanese language and Japanese brands, including for Amazon, Apple, DMM, Epos Card, JA Bank, JCB Card, JR (Rail), Matsui Securities, Mercari, Monex, Nintendo, Nomura Securities, Orico Card, PayPay, Rakuten Securities, and Sagawa Express. However, instead of merely providing fake account pages, the threat actors tapped heavily into local consumer habits by developing “points” (积分) and rewards redemption lures, pressuring victims to redeem supposedly expiring loyalty points for cash or goods. Demonstrating a deep awareness of the local economic climate, the operators also exploited cost-of-living concerns by crafting lures around the Japan Winter Electricity Subsidy.
By deploying distinct domains that impersonate everything from local transit and payment apps to major e-commerce and gaming platforms, YY Lai Yu provides an example of how comprehensive these PhaaS offerings have become. To protect this highly localized infrastructure, the phishing sites featured a unique human verification anti-bot screen that appeared prior to the actual phishing page. By requiring a manual click to proceed, this mechanism successfully hindered automated analysis by security vendors, adding a layer of stealth to the localized campaign.
Like most other services, YY Lai Yu leverages RCS and iMessage to send encrypted messages in bulk and supports synchronized interactions with victims to harvest payment card and OTP data. The administration panel allows users to query their phished data and blocklist or highlight certain types of cards according to their BIN number, blocklist individual countries or territories, and register and manage new domains for their phishing pages using Alibaba’s domain registration service. Additionally, panel administrators can create new operator users and assign them permissions. The service also offers domains that can be purchased within the administration panel.
While YY Lai Yu showcases a focus on countries like Japan, the broader Chinese PhaaS ecosystem casts a wide global net. GTIG has observed other prominent services routinely deploying automated infrastructure to compromise users across the Americas, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East.
Outlook
The continued popularity of these services demonstrates a sustained interest in payment card fraud from China-based threat actors. The multitude of sophisticated PhaaS platforms available for purchase and the threat actors’ focus on the exploitation of digital wallet tokenization and MFA bypass demonstrates that the China-based criminal ecosystem continues to evolve, enabling threat actors with limited technical skills to conduct phishing operations.
Standard phishing security measures (such as user awareness training) remain an important first line of defense. However, the proliferation of the Chinese-language PhaaS ecosystem underscores a need for technical security controls that go beyond user education. For example, transitioning to FIDO2/WebAuthn infrastructure represents an effective countermeasure against the real-time interception of account authentication OTPs. While security keys cannot prevent a user from entering payment details into a novel phishing site directly, increasing the difficulty of leveraging stolen credentials still radically shrinks an adversary’s opportunities. These enterprise authentication upgrades should be paired with risk-based verification and device fingerprinting by issuing banks during the digital wallet provisioning process.
As these operators continue to refine their tooling, the goal for defenders must shift from simply “detecting” a phish to making the victim’s credentials technically impossible to weaponize. Ongoing and frequent updates to these platforms indicate that Chinese-speaking PhaaS operators are continuing to refine their tooling to maximize global impact.
