One of the coolest capabilities enabled by the
Internet is that when you’re using it, you’re not bound by geographical
location. This is especially handy when you’re shopping. Before the Internet,
you were pretty much stuck with the selection and prices in the stores around
your home. Now, you can shop anywhere, anytime, and you can be competitive
about it.
Of
course, there are some risks that come with shopping online, too. Although
identity theft is more common in the real world, it still happens online pretty
frequently, as does credit card fraud. So staying safe while you’re shopping
online is paramount. Here are five tips for shopping safely online:
·
Choose Credit Over
Debit: You probably don’t often hear advice to use a credit card instead
of a debit card or cash, but if you can do it responsibly, you absolutely
should. Credit cards offer protection from identity theft that debit cards don’t.
However, if you’re using your debit card online and someone gains access to it,
they can clean out your checking account before you even learn there’s a
problem.. So, use a credit card instead and pay the bill off monthly.
·
Disposable Is Better: Even better than
using a credit card is to use a disposable credit card. Disposable credit cards
work just like most gift cards. Once it’s gone, you can add more, or purchase a
new one.. The bonus is that if the number from a disposable credit card is
stolen, it’s anonymous, and criminals can’t gain access to anything more than
the dollar amount that’s still available on the card.
·
Verify Website
Security: The variety that’s available when shopping online can be dizzying,
but it doesn’t stop at just the products and prices that are available online.
There are also different levels of security that are available online, and you
want to be aware of them. Some online web sites don’t offer secure shopping.
That means that savvy criminals can capture everything that you enter onto a
form on those sites, including your personal and credit information. If you’re
going to shop online, limit yourself to secure sites. You can tell if a site is
secure by the URL. A secure web site starts with HTTPS:// instead of HTTP://.
Secure sites will also have a small lock icon in the lower right corner of the
screen.
·
Don’t Shop Publically: If you plan to do
any shopping online, do it at home. If you’re using a public computer—at the
library, at a cyber café, or at work—to do your shopping, you have no control
over who might be using that computer as well. You also don’t have any control
over what kind of spyware or malware might be infecting that computer. So, just
don’t do it. Shop at home. It’s much safer.
·
Don’t Store Information
Elsewhere: Many shopping sites, even the major ones, offer you the ability to
save your credit card information on their servers to speed the shopping
process. If a company that you’re shopping with has a data breach, your
personal information could be put at risk. It takes a little longer, but
instead of storing your information on some server that you have no control
over, just enter it yourself each time you shop.
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