Internet 'Phishing' Scams on the Rise

Sitting at his home in Virginia Beach, Va., Joe Yuhasz almost reached for his wallet when an e-mail message popped into his in-box and told him America Online needed to verify his credit card information.

The site linked to the e-mail looked identical to AOL's billing center, until Yuhasz noticed the domain name was a fake -- a scam commonly known as "phishing." Most people recognizing a possible scam would have deleted the message and moved on. But Yuhasz, a cyber crime specialist for the FBI, had other plans.

The ensuing investigation led to the conviction of two people, one of whom was sentenced three weeks ago to four years in prison, and netted hundreds of stolen credit card numbers from across the United States.

This type of scam, which tricks people through fake websites and sob stories into giving up their credit card and bank numbers, is threatening to swamp the bureau's Internet crime center with the volume of attacks.

And though the scams were once the product of a few small-time hackers or anti-establishment loners in the United States, FBI officials and computer experts are seeing growing signs that the culprits are members of organized crime and terrorist support groups, almost all of whom are working from abroad.

"It has been significantly increasing month after month," says Dan Larkin, chief of the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. "United States citizens and businesses are very attractive targets for the world."

The e-mails, which ask people to "update" their personal information -- Social Security numbers, dates of birth, passwords and the like -- or tell a well-concocted tale meant to trick people into divulging their credit card and bank account numbers, now constitute more than half of the 15,000 monthly citizen complaints filed to the FBI's Internet crime center.

The scams have become the single most prevalent crime on the Internet, experts say, and they have become markedly more sophisticated over the last few months.

In December, Tumbleweed Communications, a 5-month-old anti-phishing consortium in Redwood, Calif., clocked more than 60 million phishing schemes sent over e-mail -- the highest monthly total.

The problem, though, is not just that there are more messages coming, but that more people are falling for them.