How Secure are your online payments?

We all buy things over the internet occasionally, whether it is the odd item now and again, or a regular payment for your business.

Giving your details over the internet is always a bit of a worry, will my details be stolen and cloned onto another card to steal my money.

There are 2 things you need to look for before you put your details into a web page:

1. The address at the top of the page needs to be “https:” not “http:” and
2. In the border in the  bottom right hand corner of the page there is an icon showing an image of a locked padlock.

Quite frequently you will also see a badge on the web page itself relating to the company that they have their secure service from, there are several companies that provide secure services. Such as: Thawte, Verisign and Geo Trust. These and several others give you the guarantee that your payments are securely encrypted and the details cannot be stolen easily.

There have been articles in the news recently saying that where otherwise reliable companies have moved their call centres to third world countries to save money. They have had employees taking details that customers have given them and selling them to make extra money. Unfortunately this does happen, but the companies concerned and the local governments in these countries are clamping down extremely hard on these practices. So they are quite rare.

These practices are not only carried out over the internet, when a worker in a restaurant or shop takes your card away to be processed, they can easily run them through a scanner that takes the details off them. Or they put false fronts onto ATM machines that record transactions and then use that information to clone cards. As long as you follow the guidelines in this article you will be as safe as you can be giving your details over the internet.