The number of identity-theft victims in the U.S. jumped 12 percent to 11.1 million in 2009, according to research company Javelin Strategy & Research. Fraud cases reported to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, which is partly run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, climbed 23 percent to 336,655 last year.

Information that people inadvertently make public on sites like Facebook plays a role. So too do the sort of technical exploits demonstrated by the group that recently exposed a flaw in AT&T Inc.’s (T) website.

But in many cases, finding social-security and credit-card numbers or medical records on the Internet doesn’t require computer expertise. Instead, such information is accessible to anyone who knows where to look.

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The venture-backed company is in IPO registration, so it was required to disclose in an amended S-1 filing Tuesday that a recent breach disrupted its customers’ advertising campaigns and resulted in its Australia platform going offline for 36 hours.

However, measured against social networking site Blippy, which accidentally published the credit card numbers of several of its customers on Google (GOOG) earlier this week, the lapse doesn’t look so bad. None of ReachLocal’s customer credit card data or its internal human resources information was compromised, it said.

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Networks of fraudsters use spam and malware to direct Web traffic to phony pharmaceutical sites, wrote Graham Cluley, a technology consultant for Sophos.

“Although unwitting buyers do often receive some kind of drug as result of the transactional exchange, at best the drug doesn’t work and at worse it can pose serious health risks,” he added. Cybercriminals are “putting their customers’ health, personal information and credit card details at risk” with these counterfeit versions of Tamiflu.

Many of these fraudulent pharmaceutical sites originate in Russia, Sophos’s Dmitry Samosseiko noted in a paper on the topic. One network called GlavMed, for example, has more than 120,000 online pharmacy sites selling generic drugs under the name of Canadian Pharmacy.

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Online fraud is becoming so lucrative, said Katherine Hutchison, PayPal’s senior director of global risk management, that it has developed into an industry with specialized players that hire each other in areas such as harvesting credit card numbers and freight forwarding. “A single professional thief doesn’t have to have all of the skills needed to commit fraud,” she said.

Here’s one trick: Fraudsters use telephone services designed for the deaf to get an operator with a friendly (and middle-American) sounding voice to make calls on their behalf to a call center. “The telephone operator could realize this is very likely to be fraud, but they are legally blocked from saying anything other than what the person placing the call tells them to say,” said Hutchison.

Old techniques to track down fraudsters are becoming less helpful, she added.

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