Phishing. Cutting the Identity Theft Line

"Phishing" is the hot new identity theft scam. An unsuspecting victim receives an e-mail that seems to come from a bank or other financial institution, and it contains a link to a Web site where s/he is asked to provide account details. The site looks legitimate, and 3 to 5 percent of people who receive the e-mail go on to surrender their information-to crooks. One e-mail monitoring organization reported 2.3 billion phishing messages in February 2004 alone. If that weren't enough, the crooks have expanded their operations to include malicious code that steals identity information without the computer user's knowledge. Thousands of computers are compromised each day, and p…