Criminals taking advantage of online banking, Gartner says

Nearly 2 million Americans have had their checking accounts raided by criminals in the past 12 months, according to a soon-to-be released survey by market research group Gartner. Consumers reported an average loss per incident of $1,200, pushing total losses higher than $2 billion for the year. The survey results, extrapolated from a telephone poll of 5,000 consumers conducted in April, offer a rare glimpse at the state of bank fraud: Financial institutions are tight-lipped about fraud losses. But Litan said the study confirms comments she regularly hears from bank investigators. The trend neatly follows a sharp rise in so-called phishing e-mails, which attempt to steal consumers' user names and passwords by imitating e-mail from legitimate financial institutions. A Gartner study released in May showed at least 1.8 million consumers had been tricked into divulging personal information in phishing attacks, most within the past year. Phishing attempts designed specifically to steal bank information began to skyrocket about 10 months ago, according to Dave Jevans, chair of the Anti-Phishing Working Group. Overall, phishing e-mails have jumped 4,000 percent in the past six months, and just last month, Citibank overtook eBay as the most common target. The company faced an average of 16 attacks per day, and 475 separate phishing attacks during April, an increase of nearly 400 percent from March.