The Chinese government is cracking down on home-grown cyber thieves seeking to steal online banking details.
The move comes as the personal details of more than 45 million Chinese people were stolen in separate attacks.
The government is investigating the thefts and said that the wave of attacks "threatened internet safety".
Crime spree
The 10 biggest search engines in China have signed up to the anti-phishing scheme to ensure that users looking for bank websites go to the right place.
When people visit the fake site and enter their login details these are recorded by cyber criminals who may loot the account soon afterwards.
By ensuring that the websites of banks appear first, the government hopes to limit the numbers of people falling for phishing scams and visiting the fake sites.
Some of the search engines will put a special icon next to the bank links in lists of results to flag them as legitimate.
Hacked accounts
On Christmas day, the hugely popular Tianya chat site revealed that the login names and passwords from 40 million of its users had been stolen. The attackers got away with email addresses, login names and passwords. Again, all the details were stored in plain text.
"The department believes the recent leak of user information is a serious infringement of the rights of internet users and threatens internet safety," the Ministry said in a statement
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