And the problem is set to get worse in Ireland as criminal gangs from Russia, Eastern Europe and South Africa devise ever more sophisticated scams to steal people's details and use them to set up bogus bank accounts in their names, according to Sean O'Connell, IT security consultant with Computer Associates Ireland.

Credit card fraud is the most common form of identity theft and while figures are difficult to get, 10% of all credit card transactions are a result of such crime, O'Connell told the Sunday Tribune.

"The criminal gangs know that they have a maximum of 12 hours before the credit card companies will be alerted to the theft. But the damage is done by then, " he said.

Phishing - a scam in which criminal gangs send out bogus emails purporting to be from main street banks requesting your credit card or password details - is now at epidemic proportions in the US and the UK and is on the increase in Ireland, warned O'Connell.

"The Irish banks are putting out phishing alerts every two to three weeks now.

But it takes just 10 hits from 10,000 bogus emails to make it economically worthwhile for the criminals, " O'Connell said.

But as the 1.4m Irish people with access to the internet become more aware of phishing, the criminal gangs have developed an even more sophisticated scam . . . multimodal attack, he said.

"This involves sending out a programme, most frequently hidden inside other legitimate software programmes such as firewalls, which infects the computer.

This 'Trojan' programme is designed to activate when an individual contacts their bank online and replicates the keystrokes.

"This information, including passwords and credit card numbers, is reported back to the 'mother' computer, which can harvest information from over 1.5m PCs worldwide at any one time and then use it to steal from the individual's account, " said O'Connell.

A 19-year-old man was last week jailed for 15 months in England for downloading over 10,000 complete identities, which included names, dates of birth, mothers' maiden names, addresses and bank details. Cally Leeming admitted that he would select his victims, move them to a new address with their bank and then strip their assets and credit. The Irish Payment Services Organisation (IPSO), the umbrella body for payment services for financial institutions in Ireland, agreed that identity theft is on the increase in Ireland.

"We have warned people not to give out their personal details over the internet, " said an IPSO spokeswoman.

Identity thieves can also get a wealth of personal information from old bank statements, letters etc, by rummaging through people's rubbish in a practice known as 'dumpster diving'.

'This woman was pretending to be me all this time' FOR two years, Ciara (not her real name) never had any idea that she had been the victim of identity theft.

When her passport was stolen in a Dublin nightclub in the summer of 2004, just days before she was due to travel to America, she saw it as more of an inconvenience than a danger.

"It wasn't like they had stolen my credit cards or bank cards, " she said. "I would have cancelled those immediately. I was never told to do anything about my passport, especially as the passport of"ce already knew it had been stolen. I thought that it was "ne."

Ciara reported her passport stolen in Pearse Street garda station that very night, applied for an emergency one for her travels and was duly issued with a replacement passport. The stolen one was forgotten.

Forgotten, that is, until a few days before Ciara set off for a year-long trip to Australia at the end of last month. She received a call from Pearse Street station regarding her stolen passport and was told that a woman had been charged with identity theft and fraud.

An American woman has been posing as Ciara for the last two years. There was a resemblance between the two women and on the strength of the passport, she opened up several bank accounts, credit card accounts and overdrafts.

Using Ciara's name, she gained access to a postbox in an apartment block in Sandymount and used that as her address. She then went about running up debts estimated to be in the tens of thousands of euro. In the station, Ciara was shown a "le on the American that was several inches thick. Throughout it, again and again, appeared Ciara's face and her signature, signed perfectly.

"I actually can't believe it, " said Ciara. "I'm still in shock. This woman was pretending to be me all this time, she was me for all this time. I can't believe she got away with it for so long. I have so many questions still. What happens when I want to get a mortgage? Or buy a car? She, or me, is blacklisted in so many banks. It's just horrible."

Ciara has been told that when she encounters trouble with "nancial institutions in the future, and it is certain that she will, she will have to refer them to the gardai for clearance. In the meantime, she has set off for Australia, hoping she will have no trouble getting into the country.

"I never had any idea this could happen to me, " she said. "It's something you read about now and again, but you never really believe it.

Now I have no idea what kind of trouble I could have in the future because of this woman."