Now with banks losing more than 30 million pounds to online crime last year, consumers are being warned today that they must start taking responsibility for their own security or possibly lose out. It comes as a report claims there is a new victim of cyber crime in the UK every ten seconds with more than 3 million offences committed last year. The vast majority involve cases online harassment, including threatening e-mails and blackmail. Our technology correspondent Benjamin Cohen is with me now.

Host: So what does this report tell us about the scale of cyber crime?

C: It looks like it's actually much larger than we initially thought, about 90% of online cyber crimes don't actually get reported to the police, and these are statistics being gathered from other sources, let's have a look at some of them. We can see that there is almost 2 million cases of online abuse, now includes things like psychological harm, and bullying on children sites like bebo, on the youth site facebook, racism and homophobia. There's also a huge amount of online sexual offences: 850,000. They include child-abusing glooming, in addition to unwarranted sexual approaches via work/ e-mail, but a really interesting point there is that online financial fraud has around 207,000 instances of that each year. And they include so-called phishing attacks, and that's when you got an e-mail supposedly from your bank asking you to log in and give your security details. The money from your account is then emptyed to an account of another victim. And then transferred out of the UK, and that's actually very difficult for the banks to be able to trace and difficult for them to recover.

H: And that's where this rather alarming warning comes in, today the banks may not continue to keep paying out in these instances.

C: It's important to stress that the moment banks do pay out in most cases, but they have been saying to me that that's when the terms of conditions are kept, and that's when people are acting responsibly. And it cost them 33 million pounds last year. That was a rise of 23 million pounds than the previous year. But paying out when it's not their fault, isn't that financially viable for the banks and they're starting to say the consumers need to take responsibility for their own actions online.

If you repeatedly fall victim to a phishing scam, when the bank has clearly after the first attack has explained to you what need to do to prevent yourself becoming a victim subsequently, of course you might expect them to turn around and question whether they should be paying out.

C: And the bank, and the banking industry is reviewing their, their codes in relation to online bank. And there can be a new code of conduct out in March of 2008. And if you wanna get any, viewers wanna get any tips, then view Channel4.com/news, um we put some tips of how to avoid being scammed in the future.

H: OK, thanks.