Stolen personal information for accessing email accounts is being sold on the internet for one US cent or less, new research has found.

Writing on Trend Micro’s Countermeasures blog, Rik Ferguson said Yahoo! email accounts can be bought on the underground economy for 0.008 cents each, with Gmail accounts fetching 0.009 cents.

Hotmail accounts are on offer for one cent, while active AOL accounts can demand prices of three cents each.
Mr Ferguson said he found one vendor offering 17,000 accounts for sale, for a total price of $355.51.

Elsewhere, fraudsters are offering active European eBay accounts for $6 each, while US accounts cost $4 each. Active, verified accounts for online payments service PayPal can be purchased for as little as $8.

Details for gold Visa and MasterCards are priced at $90 each, while platinum cardholder details can be bought for $100.

“As an interesting side note – on most of the forums I checked it seems the recession and deflation is also hitting the underground economy, with most unit prices dropping,” he wrote.

According to the 2008 Internet Crime Report from the Internet Crime Complain Center, 74 per cent of online fraud is committed via email.