phishing (FISH.ing) pp. Creating a replica of an existing Web page to fool a user into submitting personal, financial, or password data.

What is Phishing Spam?

Phishing is a technique used by internet scammers to extract personal information, such as passwords and credit card details by means of a fraudulent email and / or website identical to that of a legitimate company.

Phishing Facts

Phishing is also called spoofing.

Phishing victims have included eBay, and other auction and shopping sites, online banking sites such as Bank of America, and payment services sites like PayPal ,where people were directed to Web pages that looked nearly identical to the companies' sites.

Phishers have used stolen personal information for, making purchases in the victim's name, stealing money from bank accounts, or, in many cases, simply to create problems and hassle for the victim.

Phishers generally work by sending out e-mail spam to large numbers of potential victims, directing the recipient to a Web page appearing to be from the trusted company, but in fact acquire their account information for the phisher's use.

Phishing emails typically contain a subject and message intended to alarm the recipient into taking immediate action.

Some phishing attacks use viruses and/or Trojans to install programs called "key loggers" on your computer. These programs capture and send out any information that you type to the phisher, including credit card numbers, usernames and passwords, Social Security Numbers, etc.

Phishing is illegal and one of the fastest-growing online crimes today, with millions of computer users fallen victim to phisher scams.

An estimated one in twenty users who receive a phisher's fraudulent email will respond to it and give their personal information.

In the United States, the Anti-Phishing Act of 2005 was introduced on March 1, 2005, proposing that those criminals who create fake Web sites and spam fake
e-mails in order to defraud consumers could be fined up to $250,000 and have jail terms of up to five years.

On March 31, 2005 Microsoft filed 117 federal lawsuits in theU.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, hoping to use these lawsuits to uncover some of the largest phishing operators.

Since August 2003, most major banks in the USA, the UK and Australia have been hit with phishing attacks.

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