While holiday shoppers are purchasing more presents on the Internet, fears of identity theft and online fraud are making them more careful about using the Web, analysts said yesterday.
Online scammers are getting more sophisticated and aggressive, and "it is starting to affect [consumer] behaviour", said Jonathan Penn, an analyst at technology research company Forrester. "People are less willing to give out information. We are seeing a lot of them curb their behaviour and scale back purchases of good and services online."
Some consumers are rejecting obscure sites with rock-bottom prices and sticking with more established Web retailers they have used before, he said, adding that the impact on online retailing is difficult to measure.
In one survey, conducted by a unit of market research group TNS for anti-fraud services company MarkMonitor, 10% of respondents said fears of online fraud would lead them to do less online holiday shopping than they had planned.
Nearly 25% of the 1 015 adults polled said they had no plans to shop online this season.
The findings follow a survey of 1 071 people released in November by TNS and online privacy watchdog TRUSTe, which showed that almost six in 10 consumers -- about 49% more than in 2003 -- said they planned to cut their online shopping because of identity theft and other privacy concerns.
Phishing attacks -- spam e-mails that attempt to lure people to spoof Web sites that ask for personal or financial information that could be used to drain bank balances or fraudulently open credit card accounts -- are on the rise.
Phishers, who in the last year had posed almost exclusively as financial services companies such as Citibank or PayPal, have begun tailoring their attacks to the holiday season.
In recent incidents, phishers have pretended to be companies looking to confirm online purchases or to verify shipping information, with the aim of hitting people where they are susceptible.
"Our sense is that the bank kind of phishing is really the tip of the iceberg," said Mark Shull, president and chief executive of MarkMonitor, also a Web domain registrar.
While sellers of counterfeit or grey-market goods -- from luxury items to prescription drugs -- fall into a different category than phishers, they may use credit card information to steal money from unwitting buyers or sell that information to groups that pass it on to underground crime networks, analysts said.
Nevertheless, Shull said the MarkMonitor survey showed that some consumers willingly do business with them anyway.
To that end, almost 28% of respondents said they would throw caution to the wind and knowingly buy a low-priced, good fake of a popular item on the Web for their own use.
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