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Nowadays, online shopping, as well as banking, continuously occur in the e-commerce platform. Unluckily online scam, along with identity theft, occurs as often as you can imagine because of smart thieves and careless habits of consumers while making online transactions. Therefore, one must make sure before making any online payment, that he is doing secure online transactions.
How to secure your online transactions?
It is very well-known that online sales always have a lot of risks. However, consumers can increase their online security by doing many things. If, as a consumer, you want to be highly safe while making online transactions, you must take various significant steps.
Read along to become aware of a few tips that will help you in securing your online purchases.
Take care of passwords carefully
- Make use of a password that is difficult to guess and contains upper- and lower-case letters and numbers and symbols.
- Never use the same username as well as password for every online account.
- Always change passwords as frequently as you can, at least every three months.
- Never share your passwords or any information related to user identification. Recently a scam involved an email appearing to be from the internet provider of a user, asking these details. Remember that no internet provider, bank and credit cards, or renowned internet businesses contact customers requesting their password and username.
- Do not click on links in an email that asks for identification details. Try to reach the institution immediately by phone for reporting your concern.
Learn about some secure shopping tips
- Make it a practice to sign out of bank and credit card as well as merchant sites after completing your transaction.
- Never let the system such as computers or laptops store your usernames and passwords for merchants and banking websites.
- If you set up security questions for online sites, make use of false details not related to your details, and remember the answers.
Make use of safe e-commerce sites
- Always use a trustworthy third-party payment service like PayPal, Stripe, 2checkout, FastSpring, etc for your online transactions. Such sites will provide safe and secure transactions as well as dispute resolution services.
- Remember that secure online transactions will only occur on a site that starts with https://. Never trust any vendor that does not have the “S” after the term “https” at the beginning of any web address.
Never shop in these scenarios
- Never shop, pay any bill, and access the bank and credit card sites using public Wi-Fi. Always buy from your home using a secured online connection.
- Never use the payment option of easy pay or one-click order. It will take a few more seconds to enter a user name along with a password on a merchant website but frequently will take over months to recover from any online fraud of credit card.
- Please use almost all the latest versions of the internet browser as they will be using the most updated technology for scrambling and protecting data sent through the Web.
Do online shopping safely
- Be attentive while you visit financial as well as sales sites. Legitimate sites will be posting logos. Users will be able to click on the logo for verifying the identity of the site before they start to shop or complete banking transactions.
- Make use of one credit card only for your online shopping to limit exposure to any fraud and theft on every card. If you can, then use any prepaid debit card instead of your credit card.
Maintain flawless records
- Maintain records of all internet purchases along with transactions. Compare them with your credit card as well as bank statements each month. If there is any discrepancy, then immediately report it to the card issuer.
- Become aware of each of the credit cards in-store as protection against fraud as well as liability. Also, know what the limits of dollar amounts are for the coverage of fraud protection.
Install firewalls and antivirus programs
- Make use of nearly all updated versions of a robust antivirus as well as firewall security program.
- Please download and apply it updated from the antivirus and firewall programs whenever available for making sure your application contains the latest details regarding new scams and tricks of hackers.
- Remember to run antivirus scans daily on your device.
- Make use of advertisement blocking software as well as spyware detection programs. Keep them updated as well as often run scans with them.
Keep personal data protected
- Never post your complete date of birth on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Never post your children’s partners or closed one’s birthdates.
- Information that you may post online can get hacked as well as stolen. So remember to keep this information to a basic standard.
Be concerned about email security
- If you find any email, message, chat request, as well as online site suspicious, close the browser as well as email programs. Then shut down the device immediately. Once you restart it, run a complete anti-virus as well as a spyware scan before you log back online.
Other scenarios for secure online transactions
- If you suspect that your credit card and personal data are used online and you have not given any permission for it, then contact the main credit reporting agency as soon as you can for placing a fraud alert on the credit report.
- Immediately inform your credit card provider of any unauthorized use. Your liability for any charge will depend on your reporting timeliness.
- Remember to report any fraudulent activity that will occur on the card and bank account to become eligible for the respective protection of fraud liability.
- Moreover, if you have any queries related to online banking and credit card transactions then get in touch with the bank and credit card company immediately by phone. Be serious about all online financial transactions as well as online protection for protecting your credit ratings along with your bank accounts.
Final words about How to manage Secure Online Transactions
A vital part of today’s personal finance is to stay safe online as well as keep all accounts free from fraud. Always remember that the solution to safe online transactions is always staying informed as well as alert. For extra protection of your digital transactions and online activities, it is recommended to use a cheap proxy service to avoid any mishaps.