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'Phishing' is the process whereby a person is persuaded by the use of fraudulent emails or other means to reveal personal details such as passwords, PIN numbers or credit card details to criminals. Over the past few months, a number of British financial institutions, including Lloyds, Barclays, NatWest, Halifax and Nationwide have had their logos and web sites forged in order to convince customers that the contacts were genuine.

MasterCard will be using the services and tools of digital fraud detection company NameProtect to track down the perpetrators of the frauds which are becoming endemic on the Internet. NameProtect will deploy its Internet detection technology to continuously monitor domain names, web pages, online discussions spam email, and other online formats to identify online trading rings, phishing attacks, and other forms of online fraud the moment each attack is launched

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online. NameProtect will then instantly report back such activity to MasterCard.

MasterCard says it will turn the information over to law enforcement agencies including the United States Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the US Postal Service, and Interpol, for appropriate action. It will also alert its 25,000 member financial institutions, which can use it to protect themselves and their millions of cardholders.

According to the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) there were 1,197 unique attacks in May with CitiBank and eBay the most frequent targets. The APWG also reports that 95 per cent of phishing attacks are via spoofed email addresses. The criminal attractions are obvious; according to the APWG, phishing attacks can gain a staggering five per cent response rate of people willing to hand over their personal details in response to an email.

The US Federal Trade Commission has reported that identity theft has been the No. 1 consumer complaint for four consecutive years. Research firm Gartner says that Fifty-seven million US adults think they have received a phishing e-mail. More than 1.4 million users have suffered from identity theft fraud, costing banks and card issuers $1.2 billion in direct losses in the past year.

Whilst banks and credit card firms will reimburse customers if they have been defrauded, the costs have to be borne by the bank and ultimately the customer in the form of higher charges and interest rates.