It comes as no surprise to read this article which suggests email phishing scams are up by 180%. The payments body APACS has reported that there have been 20,600 phishing incidents involving UK bank customers in the first six months of 2008 compared with only 7,200 in the same period in 2007. The most common scams seem to be emails that pretend to be from a bank requesting that you follow a link and enter your account number and password. It still amazes me that people get caught out by these scams, whilst the emails do sometimes look genuine, it is widely publicised by banks that they will never send an email asking for your account details or password. The message here is clear, if there is any doubt, don't click on it, just delete it. If your bank does really need to contact you, they have your address and phone number.

I notice that spam seems to come in waves. You seem to get one email followed in the next few days and weeks by thousands of similar ones. The latest wave seems to be these emails that try to convince you there is a parcel waiting for you at customs, such as the email below. I'm currently receiving around a hundred of these every day. I can't help wondering whether anyone actually believes that they do have a parcel to collect and responds to the email.

Dear Sirs,

We have received a parcel for you, sent from France on July 9. Please fill out the customs declaration attached to this message and send it to us by mail or fax. The address and the fax number are at the bottom of the declaration form.

Kind regards,

Your Customs Service

Newcastle City Council released the credit card details of around 54,000 people on the internet. The blunder happened when thousands of credit and debit card details were placed on an insecure server and were accessed by overseas computers. The details accessed include payment details for council tax, business rates, parking fines and rent. The Council has said that residents should monitor their bank statements to check for any unusual activity. That’s not very reassuring to the people whose accounts have been compromised.

There has been a lot of news coverage recently about banks charging their customers unfair overdraft charges on their current accounts. The competition watchdog today launched a case against eight of the UK’s largest current account provides accusing them of unfair bank charges. The banks currently apply large bank charges on customers who have gone into their unauthorised overdraft. The watchdog has challenged these fees, however, saying they should be limited to what it actually costs the account provider when the account goes overdrawn. In some cases banks charge up to £39 for going overdrawn. The eight banks involved in this test case are Abbey, Barclays, Clydesdale Bank, HBOS, HSBC, Lloyds TSB, Royal Bank of Scotland and Nationwide. As someone who has been charges unfair fees in the past I will be watching this case with interest.

I have noticed over the last month or so that most of the spam I get seems to contain simply a PDF attachment. I was wondering whether this was a new tactic designed to fool people into opening up a dodgy file. I came across this article today that claim spammers have stopped sending pictures in their emails and instead started attaching PDF’s. It appears that they are doing this to try and get around corporate spam filters. So far, it appears to be getting through my spam filter quite effectively with several hundred of these spam mails with PDF attachments arriving each day. Whilst my daily amount of spam mails continues to rise, I suppose one good thing about this latest trend is I don’t have to read about Viagra or penis enlargement unless I actually open the PDF.

I have been caught out in the past when my account has gone overdrawn by a few pounds and the bank has charged a lot of fees on the top increasing the debt dramatically. This article, however, highlights what I hope is an extreme case of unfair charges. The article talks about an HSBC account that went £5.60 overdrawn. In the first month £184 of charges were added to the account. In subsequent months amounts of £152 and £176 were also added, making the total debt more than £500. The bank said it wrote to the customer informing them of the problem but no letters were received until nearly four months later when the debt had mounted up. In this instance the bank did apologize although the article does not state whether the customer still had to pay the charges. It makes me wonder how many other people have been caught out by this tactic.

Some thieves who stole a keg of beer are likely to find they get very sick when they try to drink the loot. The keg had been put aside for the brewery to collect because the cask was faulty. It had been left open to the elements for several days before it was stolen. Drinking it is likely to cause severe vomiting, stomach cramps and diarrhoea. Perhaps these thieves might learn their lesson.

I have noticed recently a dramatic increase in the number of spam emails I get pretending to be from banks. With most of them it’s very easy to spot they are spam as I have never heard from the bank mentioned (usually an American bank), let alone have an account with them. Recently though the spammers seemed to have moved into targeting UK banks. I have received emails recently from Lloyds TSB and Alliance and Leicester and its interesting to see the spammers have been doing their homework. The emails fit exactly with the look and feel of the current websites and even include a disclaimer on the bottom about not divulging your banking details. I know that no UK banks would ever send you an email asking you to click on a link and re-enter your details. In addition, I am not fooled when directed to a website that looks like my banks website but has a completely different URL, however, I'm sure there must be people who do get caught out by the spam emails and end up divulging all of their account details. I have got to the stage where I automatically delete any emails claiming to be from a bank. If my bank did try to contact me by email, they wouldn’t have much luck, but then they do have my address and phone number if it’s important.

Orange have been criticised over its use of the term "unlimited" used in its advertising for broadband, because they do in fact limit customers to 40GB of monthly downloads and 1,000 minutes of calls. Whilst most customers are unlikely to use anything close to this download limit, it still seems to be false advertising to say there are no limits when they quite obviously are.

In a scam in Japan thousands of sheep were sold to unsuspecting customers who thought they had brought a poodle. The scam was only uncovered after one unhappy customer noticed her dog didn’t bark or eat dog food. After an investigation it turned out her dog was in fact a sheep.

A lamb.

It’s easy to assume when shopping with a well known company that your credit card details are kept safe. However the theft of 46 million credit card details from TK Maxx shows that even large companies may not keep your details secure. Personally when shopping online I prefer to use my Paypal account, if I am using a website for the first time, so that I don’t actually have to expose my card details. Like many people though I don’t think twice about using my credit card when shopping on the high street. It makes me wonder whether I should go back to withdrawing cash and avoid paying with my card altogether, or perhaps I am just getting paranoid about the whole thing?

As a regular user of Ebay I am well aware that I should avoid those sales where you get a "buy it now discount" if you contact the seller directly over email. This article on Ebay scams is useful reading for anyone using Ebay and shows how such scams work.