The second week of the Fraud Fortnight campaign focuses on online identity fraud, where victims fall prey to phishing and other scams aimed at installing malware, keystroke loggers, drive-by downloads and other malicious programs on their computer.

The explosion in popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are contributing significantly to increased fraud levels, with many people unaware of how careful they must be when posting personal information to the Web.

"People are putting enormous amounts of information on the social networking sites and they are just inviting potential identity fraud to occur," Sylvan said.

"People are harvesting those sites for information. The Nigerian scammers are starting to turn to the romance scams on the basis of a lot of that information."

The scammers use the personal information posted on MySpace and Facebook profiles to strike up a relationship with a potential victim, even leveraging VoIP to make any phone calls appear as if they are coming from an Australian phone number.

"One of the typical things they then do is tell their victims they are traveling overseas, and then frantically call saying they have been mugged or attacked and need money. Of course they have been in Nigeria or wherever all along, but by that time people feel they have got a friend and are very responsive and send money to these people," Sylvan said.

"People are just very trusting and that is a great thing for a society. But when you've got such organized criminal activity in this space, and they are so sophisticated, then we just have to be more careful."