I Want To Shop on The Web, But I’m Scared!
It has become a part of the holiday spending season, just like snowflakes and bad traffic: reports that confirm a larger and larger percentage of holiday shopping is being done online. If you go back to 1995 when the Internet first hit it big, less than one percent of holiday shopping was done online. Fast forward to today, and almost 30 percent of shopping is done in cyberspace. But many folks worry about the safety of giving out their credit card numbers online. If you are still parked at the on-ramp on the information superhighway, here are a few tips that will help get you into the fast lane.
The first thing you should do is to double check what your credit card’s rules are on fraud protection. A recent law passed requires that most cards offer full protection after $50, but there are many loopholes, such as fraud must be reported within a set amount of time, and many other such conditions. If you are worried that your card doesn’t offer this protection, call and ask and if they don’t, use a different card.
A new tool that many credit card companies have begun to use is the temporary credit card number. To get one of these, you can either call your credit card company and some even have software you can download to your computer that will generate a temporary card number that is only valid for a short period of time. You then take this alternate card number and use it online. That way, if this number is stolen, it won’t be useable for very long and it is not directly connected to your account, all but wiping out identity theft. The big drawback to this, of course, is that if you don’t have the installed software that will generate a new, temporary number in a matter of seconds, you would have to call your credit card company every time you want to buy something online, go through their phone tree, wait on hold to talk to an operator and then the number. In the amount of time it takes to do this, most people can go to the mall and buy whatever they want in person.
A brand new security feature that some cards are implementing now is an additional password that is associated with your card. When you go to buy something online, you would need your card number, your expiration date, your CCV number (that three-digit number on the back or on the front of your card) and an additional password. While this option might end up being a cure-all at some point in the future, only a handful of merchants online accept these passwords. So if your card number is stolen, having an extra password assigned to your card isn’t going to stop that person from using it at millions of online retailers. Once the password feature becomes more common, it could be a huge deterrent to online fraud.
Finally, most folks have been using their CCV number long enough now that they know what it is. The introduction of the CCV number was to help with online number theft, but much like the password, there are still such a large amount of retailers that don’t ask for it, simply stealing the number and the expiration date is enough