Leader: Police must do more to stop phishing

Online scams are nothing new.

Perhaps the most common and detrimental type these days is the phishing scam, whereby con artists send out legitimate-looking emails asking for personal information, credit card numbers, etc., that are then used to take surfers' money or steal their identity.

Phishing has become something of an epidemic. Earlier this month, email filtering company Brightmail said more than three billion of this sort of email have been sent out. Three billion!

And people are still falling for them (though we hope savvy silicon.com readers know better). In the US, some 30 million people have fallen victim to these scams, according to Gartner, while about 92 million have received the messages. (Kudos to the 62 million who just hit delete.)

We've written about how to solve this problem before - we've encouraged individuals to be wary of email solicitations and told companies to educate their employees about them. We've also called on the authorities to do more.

Apparently it hasn't been enough. Given the tenacity of these phishers - and the large sums of money they're swindling from the unsuspecting - we need to do more to catch them.

Progress has been made. A handful of alleged phishers, who may have links to Russian organised crime, were arrested in the southeast of England in the beginning of May.

It's a good start - but we could still do more.

Industry groups say the police lack the resources - both funds and personnel - to properly fight cybercrime. There's no excuse for this, especially now that high-tech crime has the same level of impact as traditional crimes such as burglary and vandalism.

Yes, individuals should take responsibility for their actions and not give out sensitive information on the web willy-nilly. And, yes, companies should do what they can to prevent workers from being taken advantage of online while at work.

But the authorities - both local and federal - must also do their part. Our only hope of stopping this scourge is to go to the source and prosecute the individuals making money off the naive.