Leader: The end of the 'phishing' line

The practice of 'phishing' – whereby spam emails try to lure unsuspecting victims to enter account details on a fake web page of a trusted institution such as a bank or ecommerce site such as eBay – has received more than its fair share of coverage in both the IT and mainstream press over the last few weeks.

It's a fairly obvious con that most people spot straight away through the atrocious grammar and spelling in the emails. But what happens to the details of those who fall for the scam?

In the case of bank account details those details will be used to clear out the account and pay for often illegal goods.

In the case of eBay, which is the subject of more than its fair share of phishing campaigns by fraudsters, silicon.com can finally reveal today how the criminals use those hijacked eBay accounts.

The fraudsters lurk around auctions which offer goods such as laptops and then contact the bidders through the auction page offering to sell the same product cheaper if the deal is done direct and not through auction. The fraudsters are even quite clever in charging just less than market value for the goods. The offers aren't so good as to alert suspicion.

But of course once the buyer has sent off the cheque the money is banked and the laptop never arrives.

It is another level of trust that the criminals are trying to access to gain people's confidence. Most people would still be wary of a transaction like this but if it appears to come from a genuine eBay account with good ratings from previous customers then some people are, inevitably going to be fooled.

While educating customers and users about such scams will play its part in combating the fraud it is yet another instance of no-one wanting or able to take responsibility for cracking down on such scams, which individually may not amount to much but collectively add up to serious large-scale organised fraud.

In this case eBay could only issue a warning to customers to be alert and said that as the transaction occurs outside its auctions the buyer protection guarantees do not apply and cannot be enforced, while the police said that as the transaction money was banked in Spain it is out of its jurisdiction.