Phishing Email Scams - are so called because the criminal sends out loads of bait in the form of trick emails, hoping to get a few bites, similiar to fishing!
The usual method is an email that appears to be from a Bank or Payment Service company such as PayPal, the email will use the correct (but stolen) trademarked grafics and can look convincing.
The phishing scam email will normally ask you to log into your account to confirm your details for some spurious although convincing reason - such as their annual updates or a routine security check - they will then provide a link to the website for you to click.
This link may look correct, the website may look correct too - these phishing criminals can be sophisticated - but is infact a page that looks like the correct target page, if you enter your details, the criminal will be able to log into your real account and steal from you.
Generally internet banking is considered to be very safe. Phishing is the exact equivalent of a man coming up to you in the street, showing you an id card and asking to look at your credit card and PIN number as a security measure ... now, not many people would fall for that!
The phishing scam works by preying on ignorance, there are several ways to protect yourself 100% against these scams. I won't bother to tell you about how to check the RFC-822 Headers on the email, or to view your mails in plain text only, because if you even knew what those phrases meant you would probably be geeky enough to be doing it already! As we are not all computer geeks but generally regular people who want to use the websites and email safely then these few simple rules will be enough ...