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In November last year the HMRC lost discs containing information on 25 million child benefit recipients, including bank and building society details, NI numbers and home addresses.

It has now emerged that spammers are sending messages claiming that people whose details were lost are eligible

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for compensation of £215.

"This phishing attack has echoes of traditional get rich quick scams, praying on the desire to be compensated for the government losing their data, but people must learn that there really is no such thing as free money," says McAfee security analyst, Greg Day.

"Recent high profile data loss incidents have left the public more vigilant about handing over information that has any link to HMRC, so this may not be the most thoroughly considered phishing attack."

It is unlikely that these phishers actually have access to the lost data, explains Toralv Dirro, a security strategist at McAfee. Phishers are simply using the event to catch people's attention.

"The website that the phishers are attempting to lure users to has been taken down, but we don't know how many people were affected," says Dirro.

The site was hosted on a hacked computer in Germany, suggesting that it was an amateur attempt. Professional spammers tend to use dedicated servers based in Russia or South Korea.