By Jeremy Robertson
Millions of people will be shopping via the web this year, In spite of all the hype of identity theft and online fraud. There will be about a 3rd of these shoppers will experience some type of on line fraud. So here are some things to help you protect your self online.
Never use the auto fill option in your browser, as this can store your credit card numbers and anybody can use that to make fraudulent purchases. Also do not use the remember password function as this makes it easy for someone to gain access to your online accounts. Another thing you can do is delete your cookies and temp files, because the browser may keep personal information in these directories.
You can also protect yourself by checking out a reseller’s site before you make a purchase. The best way to do that is go to www.resellerratings.com this site holds ratings for thousands of reseller web sites and is a good way to see how they treat their customers. Another good practice is to only use resellers that use HTTPS:\\ (secure HTTP) shopping carts. This means that the data sent over the internet is encrypted and stored in a secure server. This means it is much safer for you as a shopper.
So many people are using Ebay these days because you can find almost anything at a reasonable price. However with Ebay you have to be especially careful because a thief on Ebay has nothing to loose he can cheat you out of your money and or personal information and then simply change his user name and do it to some one else. One way to guard against this is always check the feedback rating of the customer if it is 95% or higher then this person is probably a good reseller. BUT, don’t just look at the percent of positive feedback, look and see how many positive feedback they have total. This will tell you if this person has been selling for a while and will tell you a lot about his shipping time and communication practices. When buying from a person on Ebay it is common practice to use Paypal. Paypal is an online money transfer company. They are safe, secure, and had lots of tools to help you if you do get taken advantage of.
So I hope this article helps you have a safe and merry Christmas.
Jeremy M. Robertson
Senior Technician
The Computer Generation Inc.