"For your protection, your Barclays account has been suspended..."

If you see an email arrive in your mailbox with the above title, feel free to discard it - nothing good will come of it, unless your idea of "good" is "filling in all of your personal information into a fake banking webpage then sending it to a scammer."

The missive is sent from a free Yahoo email address, and works along the same line as these scam mails from a few weeks ago.

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They claim your account has been suspended due to a large number of incorrect login attempts, and reactivation is a case of filling in the attached form before the 9th of December - otherwise your account will be disabled. With a fake time limit imposed on the customer, they open up the attached HTML form and see that it asks for an awful lot of information. Name, membership number, passcode, date of birth, mother's maiden name, address...

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Of course it gets worse. Before you know it, our panicked bank customer is filling in their sort code, account number, telephone banking password and the three digit security code from the back of their card.

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Once all of this is done, hitting the "Next" button submits the data to the scammer then redirects to the Barclays website. Please avoid mails such as the above and keep your money where it belongs - your bank will never email you asking for account information (and they certainly won't email you from a free webmail account!)

Christopher Boyd