ONLINE fraudsters are stealing hundreds of thousands of personal records to trade on the web.

Businesses are advised to stay vigilant to online fraud after research by C6 Intelligence found 39,000 records had been compromised in Brighton.

Of these about 5,000 were high risk and included details such as email passwords, credit card numbers and secret question answers.

In Sussex 309,000 compromised records were found, with 34,000 considered high risk.

Darren Innes, chief executive of C6, said: “It’s definitely increasing and it will continue to do so. It’s not a case of ‘will my email be stolen’, it’s a matter of when. It means you have to be smart about passwords.

“Our purpose is to get ahead of the criminals and stop them ripping us off. It’s very hard to track them across borders. As they operate in the ‘dark web’ it is virtually risk free crime.

“Businesses get targeted regularly. People try and hack in and get customers’ data.”

The founders of due diligence company C6 used to work for the City of London Fraud Squad and have access to the ‘dark web’ – an anonymous part of the internet difficult to monitor.

In the last two months it has seen an increase of more than 5,000% in the number of identities going up for sale each day.

Simon Bell, a former University of Sussex student and malicious software expert, said: “Unfortunately online fraud and cyber crime is on the rise and will continue to be.

“This is mainly because we all carry around multiple computing devices everywhere we go (phone, laptop, tablet etc) and we share a lot of information with these devices.

“If criminals can get their hands on this data it’s a goldmine which then can then be sold on the dark web.”

Mr Bell said modern viruses and trojans collect passwords, credit card information and email addresses, and then send them back to criminals for trade on sites like Silk Road.

His ‘honeypot’ found attacks coming from China, Russia, America and Europe.

People are advised to only download apps and programs from trusted sources, such as Google Play, Apple Store, Microsoft and look carefully at what permissions an app ask for.

Different passwords should be used with apps available to help store or remember.

To find out if your details have been stolen go to www.hasmyidentitybeenstolen.com