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Americans lost $500 mln to phishing

Phishing has cost U.S. consumers $500 mln, Ponemon Institute and Truste say.
Written by ZDNET Editors, Contributor

Phishing has cost U.S. consumers $500 mln, Ponemon Institute and Truste say. Truste arrived at the $500 mln figure by applying the survey's $115 average loss per victim to the general Internet population. Gartner earlier calculated that a whopping $2.4 bln was lost to phishing fraud in a 12 month-period. At least 70% of respondents to the survey said they had visited a spoofed Web site. About 15% of those people said they had parted with private data such as credit card numbers, checking account information and social security numbers. A little more than 2% of all the people surveyed said they had lost money, in most cases within two weeks of being phished.

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