Scammers caught in the PhishTank

A week after PhishTank officially launched, about 2,300 suspected data-thieving Web sites have been reported to the online community watch effort, according to the program's site.

PhishTank was established to collect data on phishing Web sites and help rid the Web of the increasingly prevalent scams that try to trick unsuspecting Internet users into giving up sensitive information.

PhishTank calls on people to submit suspected phishing Web sites and to verify whether a site is really part of a scam. A voting system was designed so users can vote "phish" or "not phish," to reduce false positives.

Of the submissions to PhishTank, 877 were verified to be actual phishing sites, according to the site's statistics page Monday morning.

PhishTank isn't the only community-based approach to fight the online fraud schemes. In March, Sunbelt Software and CastleCops launched a volunteer group dedicated to combating scams, dubbed the Phishing Incident Reporting and Termination squad, or PIRT.

PIRT tries to take down phishing sites, while PhishTank accumulates data to create a blacklist of known phishing sites.

The PhishTank blacklist is available to anyone and can be used in antiphishing products such as Web browser toolbars. OpenDNS, the company behind PhishTank, uses it as well to block phishing sites for users of its free DNS service.