Criminals Target Electronic Banking

Phishing scams are increasing by 50 percent from month to month, according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, an industry association of banks and Internet companies that monitors the trend. The consortium's research indicated that an average of about 50 new phishing attacks were spawned every day in June 2004, with a host of prominent company names being used.

And although phishing scams may sound easy to detect, 28 percent of U.S. adults were unable to distinguish between phishing attacks and genuine online forms, according to a national survey commissioned by MailFrontier, a computer security firm based in Palo Alto, Calif.

Observers say this is understandable among customers adapting to online banking.

"It's hard when consumers get legitimate e-mails and then get phony ones," said Hillebrand.

And some worry about senior citizens' susceptibility to phishing.

"These consumers are new to the Internet," Dave Jevan, chairman of the Anti-Phishing Working Group, testified during a March Senate hearing, and "not educated about the new dangers of phishing fraud."

Experts Offer Advice

Still, consumers' groups and government agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Bureau of Investigation, offer a number of suggestions for avoiding phishing and other scams:

• Do not reply to any unsolicited e-mails requesting private financial information, and do not click on links within those e-mails.
• Contact the institution represented in the e-mail and ask about it, or type in the genuine Web address of the company to contact it about the message.
• To see if a Web page is genuinely secure, look for the "lock" icon at the bottom of your browser window, and see if the Web address begins "https."
• Always review your financial statements in a timely manner, to detect any suspicious activity.

Similarly, said Jevan, "There is no reason for any site to request your ATM PIN. Any site that requests this is fraudulent."

ATM Fraud a Danger

Even apart from such phishing tricks, however, ATM fraud itself remains a serious concern for law enforcement officials. The American Bankers Association has estimated that more than $50 million a year is stolen via schemes involving doctored ATMs.