According to an article over at Ars Technica, phishing - the act of sending emails or hosting web pages that impersonate the the identity of another institution for the purpose of theft - actually hurts the reputation of the spoofed institution. And it does so by no small margins. Out of the surveyed sample, banks suffered the worst with a 41% hit, while social networking sites chalked up hurt feelings from nearly a third of all respondants.

This has to be terrible news for MySpace. I personally have helped several MySpace users clear up pages that had been phished away from the users.