How can you protect yourself while shopping online?

You are probably aware of various dangers waiting for the people willing to buy anything online. Of course, even though there are indeed many risks, there is certainly no need to resign from this amazing opportunity for purchasing great goods for attractive prices.

When it comes to online shopping and cybersecurity, there are a couple of things you can do in order to keep the process of shopping safe. Read this article and remember all of the suggestions given here.

Create separate email addresses for shopping and bank information

The very first thing you should take care of is dividing your online activity into two different categories. It is crucial to have separate accounts for online shopping and online banking since there are some threats you can come across if suing the same email addresses for these two purposes.

First of all, you will never have a one-hundred percent guarantee the online shop you have chosen is completely safe. There is always some probability it might belong to scammers who might have ways for hacking your accounts. As you can imagine, it will be safer for you to separate all of the banking activity from shopping so that your shopping accounts cannot be linked to the information you are using to your banking accounts. This will help you to keep your finances safe.

Another possible threat is just some general attack which you might encounter while shopping and again, you do not want hackers to get access to your financial accounts my any chance.

Refrain from shopping while using public networks

It will be a very great approach to use exclusively your private networks for shopping and any other online activity which will include sharing your banking information. Unfortunately, using public networks, no matter how useful it might happen sometimes, is actually a rather risky endeavour and it is generally recommended to use such networks as rarely as possibly.

What you certainly should never do is purchasing them for shopping as your data can be stolen extremely simply. In addition to it, there is always a risk of connecting a fake network in the first place and you might not be able to distinguish a real one from the one belonged to scammers thus easily.

Be careful about the choice of an online shop

Of course, when it comes to online shopping, there is always a probability of using a website which is held by scammers who are working in the direct way which means, instead of stealing your personal data they will just steal your money. Once you pay for the goods you have chosen, you can just forget about your money, because scammers will not send you any purchase.

One more option is just losing your personal data which will be misused by untrustworthy owners of the shopping service.

In order to protect yourself, you can first check online the legal information about the company which offers the services of online shopping. In many countries, you will be able to find an official registry of information of the companies registered on their premises and you can look for the one where you would like shop.

Pay attention to any information required by the shop in order to proceed with the purchase. Some services will ask you questions which they actually are not supposed to ask including the surname of your mother or other questions resembling the ones which are frequently used by banks for retrieving passwords. You can even come across the websites which directly ask for the information about the passwords required by your bankcard or bank account.

Use a separate bank account or a wallet for online shopping

You can protect yourself even more creating a separate bank account or digital wallet for online shopping which will be particularly handy if you would like to explore smaller and less known shops. Certainly, not all of them are bad and provided by scammers. There re just a great variety of small business trying to find their niche online and there is nothing wrong in shopping with their help, however, it is always better to have extra protection and minimise the chances of losing your money.

It will be a good idea to send to such a separate account used for shopping an exact amount of money you would like to spend now so that, in case of any trouble when scammers actually get access to your wallet or bank account, there will be nothing they can steal from you. Of course, send the money for shopping right before making a purchase.

One thought on “How can you protect yourself while shopping online?

  1. A nice option is also the virtual one-time payment cards, which can be used only once, so no one will ever use them for fraud.

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