By now most internet users recognise bogus e-mails purporting to be from banks or credit card providers. Now they are being fooled by similar messages supposedly sent by firms such as Amazon and eBay.

Shoppers are more vulnerable to “phishing” attacks because they are accustomed to receiving genuine messages from online retailers.

Ninety per cent of scams are imitations of financial services companies. But others involving retailers and internet service providers have been growing steadily since October.

The scammers send e-mails telling the victims that they need to update their details to receive a recent order or benefit from an offer.

Most recipients will not have an account with the retailer and realise that the e-mail is bogus, but some are likely to be regular customers.

The e-mail invites the recipient to click on a link that appears to be to the retailer’s address, but which directs to a website run by the criminals.

The basic scams ask customers to type in their details, but more sophisticated schemes require only that users visit the website, which install “trojan” software on the victim’s computer. It then records the password the next time it is used.

Phishing websites, which look almost identical to genuine sites, have multiplied in recent months as scammers resort to increasingly sophisticated methods.

According to the AntiPhishing Working Group, a global policing association, 28,531 new phishing sites were detected in December 2006, compared with 7,197 in December 2005.

A recent example is an e-mail that purports to be from Amazon’s antifraud department claiming that there has been suspicious activity in the recipient’s account. It asks the user to click on a link that reads “www.amazon.com” but actually leads to a Dutch website.

The Fraud Intelligence Bureau said that banks and credit card companies in Britain had lost £12.2 million to internet fraud in 2004 and £22.5 million in the first half of last year.