(Computerworld) -- More than 3.5 million U.S. adults lost money to phishing scams and online identity theft in the 12-month period that ended in August, a 57% increase over the previous year, a Gartner fraud analyst said today.

The bad news, said analyst Avivah Litan, didn't end there. About 3.3% of the 4,500 Americans polled in August said they had been victimized by a phishing attack and had lost money in the deal. In 2006, the figure was 2.3%.

And banking regulators are both "in the dark" and "asleep at the wheel," she noted.

In other words, phishing is far from ancient history. Even consumers familiar with the concept -- and those, said Litan, remain a minority -- are not necessarily immune from current scams. "Phishing is much more surreptitious, much more devious," she argued. "They're grabbing information from Facebook and MySpace and sending e-mail like they're your friend. Then there's greeting cards and charities, both of which are up dramatically."

The practice hasn't gone unnoticed by other security experts, who have remarked -- most notably about the Storm bot-building Trojan -- that clever social engineering strategies are all the rage. The constantly changing cycle of new techniques simply makes it that much harder for consumers to recognize what's legitimate and what's illegal.

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