Online fraud watchers reported nearly 1,200 new phishing attacks in May, and warned that the number is rising.

The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), which monitors the internet scams, said that nearly 40 new attacks were seen every day in May, representing a 700 per cent increase since January this year.

Most commonly, phishers use spoof emails to trick recipients into handing over bank account or other financial details. Spoofs claiming to come from US banks rose 170 per cent in May month on month.

But while the phishing threat is growing, most of the fraudsters use relatively unsophisticated methods to trick victims.

The APWG said that 95 per cent of these bogus emails employ so-called 'domain spoofing', which uses a forged 'from' address to hide the sender's identity.

"Once ISPs start to verify the source of messages a lot of bad things in email, including phishing, will be greatly reduced," said Dave Jevans, chairman of the APWG.

Microsoft last week revealed plans to combat the problem of domain spoofing by introducing methods of checking the sender address with the IP address of the email, which is much harder to forge.

Anti-Phishing Working Group