Toronto Police Bust Vehicle-Mounted SMS Blaster Phishing Operation

Toronto Police arrested three men and laid 44 charges over an alleged SMS blaster operation in the Greater Toronto Area that used rogue cellular base stations mounted in vehicles to impersonate legitimate towers and push phishing texts to nearby phones. Investigators said the campaign, dubbed Project Lighthouse, began drawing scrutiny after suspicious activity was reported in downtown Toronto in November 2025, with searches in Markham and Hamilton later leading to the seizure of multiple custom-built blasters and other electronic devices; two suspects were arrested during the searches and a third later surrendered.

Authorities said the devices forced tens of thousands of phones to connect automatically, enabling spoofed messages that appeared to come from banks, government agencies, and other trusted organizations and directing victims to fraudulent sites designed to steal credentials, passwords, and banking information. Police estimate the scheme caused roughly 13 million network disruptions or instances of mobile network entrapment, temporarily knocking affected devices off legitimate service and potentially blocking access to 911, and described the case as the first known detection of this type of threat in Canada while warning that conventional smishing remains an ongoing risk.