WASHINGTON—If you’ve ever received a text message claiming to be from the United States Postal Service about an undelivered package — or from E-ZPass demanding payment for an unpaid toll — you may have been targeted by a Chinese phishing operation.

Lighthouse, a China-based Phishing-as-a-Service operation, has targeted over a million victims through its elaborate text message scam, Google alleges in a lawsuit filed Wednesday in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The company says Lighthouse’s scheme “swindled innocent victims out of millions of dollars.”

“Defendants have affirmatively directed actions at the United States, including the Southern District of New York, by creating fake websites mimicking the New York City government website (nyc.gov) and New York E-ZPass website (e-zpassny.com), among many others, for use in these phishing schemes,” the complaint said.

According to the filing, the software used by the defendants allowed cybercriminals to send mass text messages to large numbers of victims simultaneously.

Google says it was also harmed by the misuse of its trademarks and services.

“In facilitating and executing these phishing campaigns, the Lighthouse Enterprise preys on the public trust in Google, a leader in the technology space, by misappropriating Google branding, including by using Google logos on fraudulent websites,” the complaint said.

Google’s logos were used on spoofed websites to trick victims into providing personal and financial information, according to the company.

The court this week granted Google a temporary restraining order against Lighthouse, which has since gone dark.

“This shutdown of Lighthouse’s operations is a win for everyone,” Google General Counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado told The Daily Wire. “We will continue to hold malicious scammers accountable and protect consumers.”

The company said it had devoted “substantial resources to investigate and combat the Lighthouse Enterprise’s criminal activity.”

An investigation by SECAlliance revealed that between July 2023 and October 2024, the platform was used to launch fake USPS phishing websites and said somewhere between 12.7 and 115 million credit cards were estimated to have been compromised across the nation.

The texts claim that the victims have an “undelivered package” and lead them to a fake website, which steals their information.

While the full scope of the enterprise remains unclear, the complaint said the Lighthouse Enterprise includes “several connected threat actor groups.”

Google’s efforts to fight cybercriminals don’t end there.

This year, the company launched new features, including using artificial intelligence to flag common scam messages.

The company is also announcing the endorsement of three bipartisan pieces of legislation targeting cyber scams.

This includes the Guarding Unprotected Aging Retirees from Deception (GUARD) Act, the Foreign Robocall Elimination Act, and the Scam Compound Accountability and Mobilization (SCAM) Act.

“From the courtroom to the Capitol, we are taking action to stop these attacks. But this is a shared fight. While we take on criminal networks and advocate for stronger laws, we are also building smarter, AI-driven tools to help you spot and avoid these scams,” Prado said.

The company says it hopes to “make the digital world a much harder place for criminals to do business.”

Congress gears up for a fight over the fate of Obamacare, Hollywood suffers a monstrous slump, and a federal contracting program aimed at minority-owned businesses fields fraud accusations.

It’s Friday, November 14, 2025, and this is the news you need to know to start your day. Today’s edition of the Morning Wire podcast can be heard below, and the video version can be seen on The Daily Wire:

Lawmakers Prepare For Battle Over Obamacare

Topline: With the shutdown finally ended, the fight between Democrats and Republicans over healthcare subsidies and the fate of Obamacare is only ramping up.

Obamacare subsidies were expanded in 2021 during the COVID pandemic. The subsidies, which are technically tax credits, were supposed to last only 2 years, but Democrats extended them through the end of this year.

Currently, about 24 million Americans are on Obamacare plans, up from 11 million at the start of the pandemic. It’s a considerable increase, mainly due to subsidies. It’s estimated that about 42% of 2025 Affordable Care Act (ACA) enrollees pay less than $10 a month, with a vast majority paying nothing at all. Notably, Democrats removed the income cap on subsidy eligibility, so people earning over 400% of the federal poverty level qualify for these subsidies, too.

The cost: The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says that extending the subsidies through 2035 would increase the federal deficit by about $358 billion.

Democrats’ message: Democrats reportedly want to make the midterms about healthcare. Their message is that inaction from Republicans will drive up healthcare costs for millions of Americans.

Morning Wire spoke to Ryan Long, a Senior Research Fellow at Paragon Health Institute, to explain all of this. He said that if these subsidies expire as scheduled, people on ACA plans will once again return to paying something, even if it’s just a small amount, instead of having access to $0 plans. Those $0 plans, he said, have actually led to widespread fraud and abuse.

GOP’s message: Republicans generally want the subsidies to expire when the Democrats scheduled them to expire. They argue that Obamacare is a failure and needs serious reforms or a complete overhaul. Premiums, for example, rose 143% in the first six years after the ACA took effect. Next year, premiums are set to rise another 26%.

As for the fate of Obamacare, President Donald Trump has ramped up calls to move on from the “Obamacare madness.”

“I am calling today for insurance companies NOT to be paid. But for this massive amount of money be paid directly to the people so they can buy their own healthcare,” said Trump.

Hollywood’s Serious Slump

Topline: Hollywood is in a major slump, with October marking the worst box office revenues in nearly 30 years. Even Halloween weekend, usually a horror cash machine, failed to draw audiences.

With the exception of the COVID-19 shutdown year of 2020, when theaters were closed, October was the worst box-office month since 1997. Halloween weekend had the worst earnings in 31 years. The biggest culprit appears to be the lack of must-see content.

The numbers: Disney’s “Tron: Ares” opened to $38 million — the franchise’s worst debut. A24’s “The Smashing Machine” with Dwayne Johnson got $11 million. The Bruce Springsteen biopic earned $9 million. The total October take was $425 million.

The first couple of releases of November aren’t faring any better. “Christie,” starring Sydney Sweeney, came out last week and was a major flop. Some are suggesting politics played a role, but given Sweeney’s popularity, that isn’t very likely. The most probable explanation is that Sweeney’s young male fan base wasn’t especially interested in seeing her look nothing like herself playing a boxer.

Expert says: Veteran Comscore analyst Paul Dergarabedian told finance outlet, Cheddar News, that a couple of Japanese anime movies outperformed expectations, and without them, the story here would be even worse.

“There was just nothing commercially exciting enough to mainstream audiences to drive them in huge numbers. And you know, last year, there was a Venom movie that opened at $50 million in October. We didn’t have that this year. And so I think that definitely hurt the box office,” said Dergarabedian.

The deeper issues: The ongoing disruption of streaming and social media is always at play, but not necessarily in the way typically thought. Many veteran filmmakers are starting to talk about the problem of what gets greenlit — they say studios are playing it safe and aren’t willing to gamble on creative, out-of-the-box ideas, so audiences are getting tired of seeing the same old thing.

Directors like Michael Bay and James Cameron are warning that something bigger may be broken. In an interview a few months ago, Bay voiced frustration over what he called “a system afraid of risk.” Now, he’s the king of big-studio blockbusters, but he said he’s moving into independent filmmaking so he can be more creative.

And he said that Cameron told him that no individual executives are empowered to greenlight anything anymore. The result is too many sequels, too few original ideas, and a growing reliance on algorithms to decide what gets made.

Crackdown On Minority Contracting Fraud

Topline: The Trump administration is turning its eye on a long-running DEI program that may be one of Washington’s most corrupt. The federal government awards a percentage of contracts to companies whose owners are “socially disadvantaged.” But they might not even be the ones doing the work. 

At issue is a process known as 8(a) contracting or “set-aside” contracting, where certain contracts, which could be for tens of millions of dollars, are either given to one company with no competition, or limited so that only “disadvantaged” companies are eligible to compete – essentially, racial minorities and women-owned companies.

This way of contracting is likely behind much of the poor performance in government, such as websites seeming old-fashioned and broken. But this has been the way Washington works for decades. Typically, GOP-favored interest groups such as disabled veterans and Alaskan native corporations have gotten a share. And then big, non-minority-owned companies end up doing much of the actual work as subcontractors.

ATI: One company, ATI Government Solutions, seemed to admit to the cozy dealmaking in an expose put out by undercover activist James O’Keefe last month.

ATI is a company that gets contracts because it’s owned by Native Americans, though on ATI’s website, all the executives listed appear to be white.

The website is almost entirely focused on selling the idea that it’s easier for government officials to skip holding a competition to find the best company for a job. Meanwhile, big companies can get a shortcut to a government contract by working with ATI, which essentially has an automatic in because it’s partly owned by an Indian tribe.

Seems sus: Kelly Loeffler, the head of the Small Business Administration, said there’s a “full review of the 8(a) program” underway that has found “institutionalized abuse” to the tune of billions.

Loeffler said ATI’s CEO, Firmadge Crutchfield, had a network of seven companies, all of which had been suspended from receiving new contracts, and that their names were provided to law enforcement. 

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), chair of the Senate Small Business Committee, said the Biden administration tripled the goal for minority set-asides from 5% to 15%, and did little to make sure they were actually doing the work, instead of serving as pass-throughs. 

“Small business contracting programs were never intended to function as welfare systems for favored classes or give no-bid contracts to do-nothing companies,” Ernst said, adding that over the decades, “penalties against rulebreakers have not been swiftly and resolutely imposed.”