Phishing: Organized Crime for the 21st Century: Phishing is on the rise, and you'll never know you've been victimized until it's far too late. Quickly becoming the most common Internet fraud, phishing is a scam in which personal or private information is extracted by a scammer by posing as a party authorized to receive it, and has become a phenomenal threat to the sanctity of online business. This document explores the scope of the phishing problem and describes the process by which the information harvested in phishing attacks is passed from one cybercriminal to the next, creating new victims every step of the way.