Phishing Works!

Point over to MSNBC and have a squiz at the latest stats, personaly I'd take percaentages and figures with a grain of salt as different market segments are going to be represented very differently.  As a gauge of the general state of phishing it probably is not far wrong.

Anti-spam firm MailFrontier Inc. showed 1,000 consumers examples of so-called "phishing" e-mail as well as legitimate e-mail from companies such as eBay and PayPal. About 28 percent of the time, the consumers incorrectly identified the phishing messages as legitimate.
What's more, the legitimate e-mails were often dismissed as potential fraud. An e-mail message from the Federal Trade Commission was dismissed as a fraud by 50 percent of the consumers.

...
Attacks on the rise, banks targeted

Not only are consumers unable to accurately spot fakes, they are regularly surrendering personal information. According to a study released in April by Gartner's Avivah Litan,  1.78 million Americans say they've fallen for a fake e-mail and willingly provided credit card numbers, bank account PINs, and other information to computer criminals.
Perhaps an additional 1 million users have done so and don't realize it, the study said. In all, the study concluded that about $1.2 billion has been stolen from U.S. financial institutions through phishing attacks.

It goes on and hints that it is all getting worse, that's probably no surprise if you are reading this.  What is needed is the so therefore to come out.  I think that will be in the shape of a whole new feel to e-commerce.

Prediction:  credit card numbers, username/password pairs and plastic cards with pin numbers are all going to be replaced by something new.  A wireless, smarter cryptographic something new.