Protect Yourself From Internet Scams and ID Theft
If you’re one of the million consumers that shop online, the listen up! Use your street smarts in the virtual marketplace and follow these basic online shopping tips to protect yourself and to ensure that your money doesn’t become part of the billion that merchants expect to lose to online fraud by spammers, scammers and shifty retailers.
Here are five tips for staying safe online:
1. Shop From a Secure PC
If possible, avoid using the family PC that your teens or children use to chat with their buddies and play games online. Those machines, especially if they’re a Microsoft Windows computer, are often already infested with spyware. An infected system will undermine all of the other precautions you might take to avoid online fraud.
Before you start shopping online, make sure your system is running with up-to-date anti-virus software, and that you’re using a firewall to block potential intruders. Just as important, be sure that your computer has the latest Microsoft software security updates installed.
2. Shop Smart, and Only at Sites You Know & Trust
Avoid search-engine shopping, which can often lead to random merchants you’ve never heard of. For the safest and most hassle-free online shopping experience, it’s best to stick with merchants you know and trust. Most importantly, make sure you have read and understand the merchant’s shipping and return policies before making any purchases.
Be sure to print a copy of each receipt or confirmation e-mail you receive. Keep all of your receipts in a folder and filed away in a safe place.
3. Shop with Your Credit Card
Most online merchants accept both credit and debit cards. Under federal law, credit card issuers can only hold customers liable for the first $50 of fraudulent transactions, and most issuers will waive even that amount. While debit card issuers have largely adopted that same approach, your bank account could be overdrawn while you dispute fraudulent charges, particularly if you don’t notice the fraud immediately. Experts say credit cards still present less potential for hassle when dealing with your financial institution should unauthorized charges show up later on a monthly statement. It’s still harder to get your money back from fraudulent transactions on a debit card unless the process is transacted in exactly the way the bank wants to be, and a lot of times consumers have no way of knowing whether a given purchase meets those requirements. Never, I repeat, never, shop at sites that ONLY offer you to wire your payment or send money orders. If they do offer these methods as a choice for the customer, that is fine as long as it is your decision to go that route.
4. Consider Alternative Payment Methods
For the truly fraud-wary online shopper, there are still plenty of alternatives to entering your account number at multiple Web sites. Many financial institutions and card issuers — including Bank Of America, Citibank, Discover and PayPal — offer customers the ability to generate unique, “virtual” or “one-time use” account numbers that are good for a single transaction or a handful of specified transactions only and cannot be reused.
While virtual account numbers may make shoppers feel safer online, they may be more hassle than they’re worth. These virtual numbers generally are there to protect [the card issuer] more than the consumer, but they do give some online shoppers more peace of mind. Studies show online shoppers are starting to turn to other alternative payment methods, such as pre-paid gift and credit cards.
5. Get a Handle on Spam
If you worry that giving away your e-mail address at multiple online merchants might wind up cluttering your inbox with more junk mail, consider creating a new address for each new Web site that requires you to enter one as part of the registration process. This allows you take action if a merchant you’re doing business with sells or rents your e-mail address to marketers. You don’t really need to create a brand new e-mail address for each site: Some free Webmail providers — most notably Google’s Gmail — will allow you to create as many “aliases” for the same e-mail address as you want. Here’s how it works. Let’s say your Gmail address is janedoe@gmail.com, and you’re being asked to enter an e-mail address at widgets.com as part of their online ordering process. Simply enter the name of the retailer as part your real e-mail address by using the “+” sign. In this case, you’d enter janedoe+widgets@gmail.com. That way, future communications from that retailer or any company that happens to share that particular marketing list will come addressed to janedoe+widgets@gmail.com. Later on, if a particular online merchant generates a wave of junk e-mail offers, you can create e-mail filters to automatically send all e-mail addressed to the custom address you created to the virtual trash bin. Many thanks to the Washington Post.
