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From a survey of 5,000 web users in April of this year, Gartner has worked out roughly two million consumers in the US have their passwords and authentication stolen and used to access funds from online and telephone accounts every year.

'In most cases that are not inside jobs, thieves likely stole account numbers and passwords to get into accounts online or through telephone banking services,' said Avivah Litan, vice president and research director at Gartner. 'Neither method involves face-to-face transactions.'

On average, each victim loses $1,200 for each hit.

Phishing scams and spyware are an ever growing

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threat, and consumers can be fooled into entering their credentials into a fake site, or revealing their authentication info by indavertantly downloading a virus or spyware that will root this out and send it off to the attacker.

Fraudulent use of stolen credit cards remained the most prevalent crime of this nature, but the second-most common and fastest growing was using stolen passowrds and so on to get access to accounts.

Gartner reckons 'shared secret' authentication is one of the best credential checking measures online banks can use, at least until the finance houses build more robust authentication services.

'It will take time for the financial services industry to develop sophisticated back-end tools, but banks must implement stronger access controls to online and telephone banking systems,' Ms. Litan said. 'Shared-secret authentication is a good practical solution for strengthening access controls for online and telephone banking.'

Shared secret authentication involves thinking up answers to a personal question, such as 'name of favourite football team,' to gain authorisation.

Have you been a victim of Internet fraud here in the UK? Leave a comment via the link below.