Another Huge Surge in Phishing Scams in April

A tidal wave of Phishing scams hit the Internet in April, with 1,125 separate e-mail fraud schemes, up 180 percent from the previous record of 402 in March. That's an average of 37.5 unique phishing scams per day, up from 24 a day in March according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG).

"This marks a huge increase in the volume of phishing attacks," the APWG noted in its monthly report. The April total marks a 4,000 percent increase from November, when just 28 campaigns were reported.

Citibank has now surpassed eBay as the favorite of phishing scams, with 475 campaigns targeting Citibank customers in April, compared to 221 for eBay and 135 for PayPal, the online payment processing subsidiary of eBay.

Phishing attacks seek to trick account holders into divulging sensitive account information through the use of e-mails which appear to come from trusted financial institutions and retailers.

Netcraft has developed a service to help banks and other financial organizations identify sites which may be trying to construct frauds, identity theft and phishing attacks by pretending to be the bank, or are implying that the site has a relationship with the bank when in fact there is none.