Massive rise in internet banking fraud

Published on Sunday 18 April 2004 01:00

EXPERTS last night renewed warnings over an e-mail fraud that targets bank customers after new figures confirmed there had been a massive rise in the scam.

An internet security firm that screens millions of e-mails a day for its 8,500 business customers said it had stopped hundreds of thousands of ‘phishing’ messages in the past few months.

A spokeswoman for MessageLabs said the "snapshot" represented the "tip of the iceberg" for the scam, which is thought to be operating out of Eastern Europe.

‘Phishing’ involves sending out millions of e-mails to people directing them to a website masquerading as their bank’s own online home.

But the site is a carbon copy of the original, set up by sophisticated criminal gangs who hope online customers will be prompted to disclose names, account details and passwords.

The information is then used by the gang, who go to the bank’s real website to clean out the customer’s account.

MessageLabs, which monitors spam messages sent to its customers, said it had stopped 337,350 phishing e-mails in January, compared with just 279 last September.

March’s figure showed a drop to 215,643, but information security analyst Natasha Staley said the total number of e-mails being sent to UK computer users would be far higher.

She said: "We only monitor our customers’ e-mails so this is just the tip of the iceberg. The true extent of the problem is impossible to quantify."

Because of the random nature of the e-mails, they are hard to block, but Staley said even more needed to be done to educate users about the risk. "I think in a way it has taken them [the banks] by surprise.

"It is up to them to educate customers about how they are going to communicate with them, so people recognise these e-mails as being false."

Many experts fear the industry has been reluctant to highlight the problem because it may discourage people from banking on line.

However, a spokeswoman for the National High-Tech Crime Unit, which is investigating the fraud, said high-street banks had been working closely together to combat the scam.

"There is not a lot more they can do apart from warn customers of the danger," she said.