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Back when the cyber scammers first started angling for suckers, a child could have spotted the phony e-mails for what they were - crude, inept parodies of correspondence from reputable businesses to their customers.
"They used to be pretty amateurish," says Joe Fouse, a senior vice president for technology at James Monroe Bank (www.jamesmonroebank.com). "There were lots of grammatical mistakes and misspelled words."
But the scammers learned quickly and honed their skills. Today, Fouse says, many of the "phish" - faux e-mails and Web sites created to defraud consumers - are virtually indistinguishable from the real McCoy.
SPAM BANDITS
Faster, smarter, slicker than their forbears, the new breed of Internet criminal is sending phish, or " spoofs," e-mails that are often near-perfect imitations of e-mails from legitimate businesses, to lure consumers into divulging bank account numbers, social security numbers, PIN numbers and credit information.
The messages often purport to be from companies or government agencies the recipient recognizes and may regularly do business with. Usually, people are redirected via links to an impostor Web site and instructed to update their account by inputting personal financial information - the phisher's primary objective and the customer's undoing.
The phish frequently hector the intended victim with urgent language and loud typography. More often than not, "IMMEDIATE ACTION" is required to prevent the cancellation of an account. One particularly audacious stratagem suggests that the consumer may have already been the victim of fraud and needs to submit information to prevent further encroachments.
The first incident of phishing dates back to 1996, but the practice has grown to epidemic proportions in the past few years.
In the six months between November 2003 and April, phishing attacks reported to the Anti-Phishing Work Group, an industry consortium aimed at ending phish scams, and other identity theft, increased 4,000 percent.
"Phishing expeditions" often target Internet service providers, online payment services and large e-commerce sites. PayPal and eBay...