To protect yourself, take the time to examine the claims made in the email. If you receive an email requesting sensitive information, check its authenticity by contacting the company that appears to be the originator of the email.
The secret is quantity. 3-5% of the recipients fall for the fraud which makes it highly lucrative.
 
Possibilities of Identity theft phishing, what are the consequences?
Cyber-criminals solicit personal data from unsuspecting victims via the Internet - like personal IDs, passwords, card numbers and PINs - and sell this information to other criminals who use it for financial gain. They can also access a customer's accounts through online banking and set up false bill payments that send checks to the criminal or a conspirator. In other cases, criminals transfer funds from all available customer accounts, including credit cards, savings accounts and home equity loans into their checking account. A copy of the customer's credit card or check card is then used with their PIN at ATMs around the world to withdraw cash from their checking account.
Several examples of banks which have had their customers fooled by the phish scams are Bank of America, US Bank, Bank of Montreal and ANZ Bank of Australia and other commercial institutions have been exposed, like eBay, Paypal, bestbuy.com, Microsoft MSN and Yahoo.

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Several precautions can be made to lower the risk / avoid phishing scams and attacks. One of our greatest fears is for our bank accounts to be robbed by hackers. Ironically, Phishers rely on these same fears to make the victim act immediately, without checking with their bank first. Spontaneous and hastened actions might, however, leave you scammed by a phishing attack.

Basic Phishing briefing & steps to avoid being phished

1. Regarding emails: DO NOT trust emails urgently requesting personal financial information!

Phishers want you to react immediately and therefore include upsetting or exciting statements which trigger fear or happiness. They may falsely claim suspicious withdrawals from your banking account, present you as the winner of a lottery or play on your passion for example politics / religion. Never give any account information on the web, no bank or any internet comerce will EVER need to ask you for your account information.
CHECK & REPORT the incident with your bank or the actual company supposed to have sent you the email so they can take steps to prevent the fraud from scamming people.

2. Be sure not to call any number or use any link in the suspected email as this may put you in the hands of those responsible for the phishing attack.
You can risc world wide web spoofing, which trap you inside a fake internet universe of the scammer, you can risk downloading nasty complex trojan horse spywares which put keyloggers on your computer, you can risk executing scripts changing your hosts file hijacking your search engine and your internet browser, directing you as they see fit to false net banks or the like to phish your information.
It is generally safer to write the banks specific address in the address field or call the banks specific number as found on their official pages, but;
WARNING; By using a trojan horse spyware, phishers can change your HOSTS file which thereby redirects specific URL's to a page of their choosing. They could copy your banks webpage and redirect you to their fake bankpage even if you wrote the exact correct address into the adress field. This means; You MUST have control over your HOSTS file.
 
3. Be suspicious of impersonal emails.
Phishing attacks are directed towards millions of people through email spam. The emails sent out during a phish are therefore impersonal and general, contrary to emails from your bank which are usually personal in nature. The big banks with a higher probability for hitting customers are the victims most subjected to this. Almost all big banks in the world have been subject to phishing frauds trying to reach their customers. Examples are the Bank of America, Bank of Montreal and the ANZ Bank of Australia.
 

4 . NEVER fill out forms in email messages that ask for personal financial information
Typicall phishing scams or hoaxes ask for information such as usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, social security numbers through an online form.Frankly speaking, the banking companies have better control over their customers and would never ask for account information. A request for these types of info should ring the alarm bell.
 

The link from the email is the key to successful phishing scamming which will send you to the phishers own internet site with an online registration of account information. If the link in question shows http://www.evilhacker.com it is likely to scare of most of its target audience.