Couldn't happen to you? Well, fraudsters stole $1 billion from nearly 500,000 Australians in 2007 alone.

This year is proving to be a bumper year. A recent round of phishing attacks against Commbank customers could be bearing fruit for criminals. Something has been going wrong there and Commbank have had some serious issues with Netbank. Take the case of Mr Pal who found $60,000 had been paid from his account.

Apparently another 'Mr Pal' had convinced Commbank tellers to pay out ammounts of up to $11,000.

From the ATM he went to his nearest Commank branch. He found both customer service and the manager unhelpful.

As soon as he could, he contacted his local police. He wasn't even given an event number. So he contacted John Rolfe of the Daily Telegraph.

"The next day $48,000 was back in my bank account,'' Mr Pal said.

The remaining $12,000 was paid by CBA to Mr Pal just before the Daily Telegraph reported the case.

The best the Australian Federal Police could do was to imply that it was the accountholder's fault by suggesting that people shred their bills to protect their identity from theft, but then they were probably just as much in the dark as Mr Pal was.

So now we need a paper shredder, a mobile phone for SMS's, the latest operating system with the hundreds of fixes, and the latest anti-virus software required just to stay behind the bad guys? $60,000 behind in this instance.

{what if the bad guys evolve to the next step, follow the postman, 'borrow' and steam open our letters from the bank while we're at work, then neatly close them up and pop them back in the box?} Try explaining that one to your helpful Commbank manager and the Federal Police.  Seems like a smart criminal would rather rummage about in a clean mailbox, rather than a dirty bin anyway.

I note that Mr Rolfe is the Tele's "Public Defender" - do we need one to get our money back?

Lame really, the whole hoohaa.

Looks like the only solution is to stop getting mail from your bank. Has it come to pass even quicker than we expected?

Banks Soon Without A Single Customer Communication Channel?