BANKS will no longer honour the debts of victims of internet fraud after a sudden rise in attacks against online accounts, The Times has learnt.

Britain’s 14 million internet bank customers have faced a month of intense bombardment from fraudsters trying to access online accounts in devious “phishing” scams.

Around 60 such frauds, each generating hundreds of thousands of e-mails, were detected in October — a 33 per cent increase from September. MessageLabs, an internet security company, is currently intercepting 50,000 messages and 80 to 100 phishing websites a day.

Banks are not insured against the losses and have to compensate victims themselves. They paid out more than £4.5 million in refunds to approximately 2,000 fraud victims in the first half of this year.

Some police officers have recommended users to abandon internet accounts altogether.

Up to now, British banks have automatically refunded money to victims, regardless of how obvious the fraud was and how much the customer was at fault.

However, the Association for Payment Clearing Services said last night that the banks were entitled to review cases individually and could not guarantee that such refunds would be made automatically in future.

“All victims of phishing scams so far have got their money back, however questionable the circumstances. But banks are entitled to look at individual cases on a case-by-case basis to make sure that the customer is not in breach of terms and conditions. There could well come a point where someone is not going to get their money back.”

Several big banks said that they could not continue to be liable indefinitely.

Mark Hemingway, head of media relations at HBOS, said: “Fraudsters do tend to target the weakest link and in some cases that is the customer. The customer does have responsibility and this is the point of educating them.

“Currently, if a customer says that he was not aware (of a phishing threat) it is very difficult to say that he should have been. This should remain the case for the next few years. But beyond that, who knows?” Lloyds TSB said: “Cust- omer liability depends on the circumstances.”

The Royal Bank of Scotland said: “We have to look at these things on a case-by-case basis.”

Just 1 per cent of “spam” e-mail originates in the UK and senders can be fined £5,000 if they are proved to have targeted private addresses. No one has yet been successfully prosecuted for a phishing scam, with the first case due before the courts in January.

The first such scam was detected in Australia in March 2003, with the first British case discovered six months later.

Such scams appeared to be in decline worldwide two months ago, with fraudsters adopting other techniques but there has been a huge resurgence since, with September and October setting records for this year.