Bank of America and Spain's Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) are the latest banks to fall victim to bogus Web fraud.
Bank of America is investigating with law enforcement authorities a fraudulent e-mail sent this week which duped 75 customers into entering personal financial information at a replica BofA Web site.
The West coast bank says the fraudulent site was shut down in 13 hours and it is working with customers who fell for the scam to help them change passwords and protect their accounts.
The bank says customers will not be held liable for any fraudulent activity on their accounts because of the bank's zero liability guarantee.
The Bank of America scam follows a weekend assualt on BBVA in which customers were contacted by e-mail and asked to re-enter their log-in details at a fake site. As with similar recent attacks on the Australian banking market, the bogus site was hosted in the US. BBVA says the site was shut down on Monday morning before any customers had input their data.
"Scams of this nature, involving the illegal collection of consumers' personal information, have occurred in the physical world for some time. The availability of this information electronically, however, speeds up the process," says Rhonda Maclean, director, corporate information security for Bank of America. "It's a reminder to all of us as consumers that we need to use the same vigilance in protecting our personal information in the electronic world as we have in the physical world."