Identity theft is the fastest-growing financial crime in the nation and the state today, state Attorney General Rob McKenna recently told a small audience at the Kitsap Golf and Country Club. “This problem is just beginning to take off in some respects,” he said.

McKenna’s presentation was part of a Predatory Lending panel that also included David Huey, assistant attorney general with the consumer protection division. The event was sponsored by Westsound Bank and Mortgage and the Business Journal.

“Increasingly, the thieves are trying high tech means of stealing our information,” he said. One of those means is called “phishing,” setting up fake e-mail messages and fake web pages that look like those of reputable banks the customer deals with, then stealing account information and passwords once a person follows the link and tries to “log on.” The scammers sent millions of those e-mails at a time, and if only one percent of people fall for it, it’s still a significant number of victims, McKenna said.

A new law which took effect last month, House Bill 1888, amends the state’s spam statute to specifically prohibit “phishing,” but isn’t intended to stop the practice, only to define penalties should anyone actually be caught doing it.

Spyware that can redirect online surfers to sites they didn’t indent to visit and keystroke logging that can be read a person’s keyboard moves are some other culprits — and there are increasingly more. Another law, House Bill 1012, that took effect at the same time as the “phishing” bill, makes it illegal for anyone to transmit software to another computer without the owner’s knowledge or to falsely entice someone to download software.

“The good news …is there are more tools available to protect your computer,” McKenna said.

The Consumer Protection Division has resources for businesses and consumers, and also investigates fraud complaints. But it has the same number of staff as it did 22 years ago.

“The problem is, 20 plus years ago no one used the Internet. We have developed over the last 20 years a new set of challenges,” McKenna’s said.

The panel discussion was held just a few days after a survey of 10,000 households showed that online consumers have increasing worries about ID theft. The Consumer Internet Barometer said about 13 percent of the survey respondents said they or someone in the household had been ID theft victims. About 40 percent of the respondents said they decreased their online purchasing due to those concerns.

Some of the basic protection tools McKenna recommended included installing anti-spyware programs on the computer, using cross-cutting shredders to dispose of financial information, paying attention to credit card statements, being “very skeptical of any request for financial information,” and monitoring credit scores regularly.