by Simon Wright

Created on: August 03, 2007   Last Updated: June 01, 2011

Internet Phishing can be defined as The use of 'spoofed' e-mails and fraudulent websites which are designed to trick recipients into divulging personal financial data such as credit card numbers, account usernames and PINs/passwords.' (Note: Phishing can also happen via the telephone i.e. someone phoning you purporting to be from a valid company but this article is specifically about Internet phishing)

The term phishing is used as the fraudsters are effectively fishing for your personal information, using their spoofed e-mail and website to lure you into giving away your details. They will then attempt to use these details to steal your money, or to commit identity theft. (Note: the ph' spelling has its origins in the hacking community when phone phreakers' were used to manipulate telephone exchanges to gain free calls.)

Phishing is most commonly used by fraudsters who wish to gain entry to your Internet banking site. However, it also extends to any situation where the fraudster thinks that they can fool you into giving them information that they can use to their financial advantage. For example, they frequently target sites such as ebay and PayPal.

To help you spot and avoid phishing scams, it's useful to know some of the main characteristics of phishing e-mails/web pages:

- Most phishing scams utilise a scatter gun approach. i.e. you get an e-mail purporting to be from Citibank, but you've never banked with Citibank. The fraudsters are basically just sending out e-mails indiscriminately to a list of harvested e-mail addresses. The cost of doing this is very small and they only need one or two genuine Citibank customers to be fooled in order for them to profit. These e-mails will generally say Dear customer' or Dear account holder' rather than specifying your name.

- Less frequently, fraudsters may send out more targeted e-mails where they already have some details about the people they are attempting to defraud. This has been termed as Spear phishing'.

- The e-mails will usually direct you to a website, and the web page will then ask you to enter and submit personal details, such as your name, date of birth, password, PIN, etc.

- Both the e-mails and the fake web page will be designed to look like the genuine company. However, the branding is usually not 100% accurate and in many cases can be fairly amateur. Large companies tend to be very strict in their branding guidelines (i.e. location of logo, colour scheme, font size and type, etc). If you see a web page

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