Fraudsters perfect the art of Phishing

Online identity stealers now prey on financial institutions, and they´re getting good at it. A recent flood of fake Citibank e-mail messages in the United States demonstrates the growing arsenal of technical and psychological tricks that online fraudsters, called phishers, are using to get people to divulge personal information. The same ploy was used on Citibank customers in Singapore last year.

Hackers first coined the term ´phishing´ in the mid-1990s to refer to the art of stealing America Online accounts. But e-mail messages collected by the Anti-Phishing Working Group, an industry association in the US, show that fraudsters are now going where the money is.