Investigation of Phone and Electricity Recharge Money‑Laundering Schemes in Illicit Apps

Recently, the author observed a forum post about an app offering VIP recharge and investigated the prevalent use of phone and electricity recharge interfaces for illicit money laundering.

The investigation revealed that many pornographic or gambling apps integrate payment interfaces that allow users to recharge phone credit or electricity bills, which are then funneled to black‑market operators.

The laundering chain involves an unsuspecting user A who discovers discounted recharge channels and a user B who downloads a shady app, follows prompts to purchase membership or game items, and then the payment is redirected through multiple intermediaries to the black‑market group.

Two main laundering methods are identified: electricity‑bill recharge (typically amounts above 200 CNY) and phone‑credit recharge (ranging from small amounts to several hundred CNY), both of which are easy to process and thus attractive for large‑scale laundering.

Additional channels include Alipay QR‑code transfers (personal and merchant codes) and WeChat red‑packet transfers, which further obscure the money trail by increasing the number of hand‑offs.

The author also performed simple server tracing, listing several API endpoints (e.g., https://api.jt*****wa.com/m_sns/video/apply_play_permission , https://api.jt*****wa.com/m_game/game_list?game_ids=%5B%5D , https://api.s****c.com/tl/index/cache/version?appId=10005 ) that are used by the illicit apps.

Conclusion: black‑gray market operations remain a persistent threat to cybersecurity, evolving from manual cash withdrawals to sophisticated recharge‑based laundering, and users are urged to install anti‑fraud tools such as the National Anti‑Fraud Center app.