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Health & Fitness

Safe Online Shopping This Holiday

Although shopping online can help you avoid long lines, it can also expose you to tactics used by cyber criminals. Here are some tips to keep your online shopping safe and secure.

With the holidays in full swing and Christmas only a few days away, I thought it would be a good idea to get a quick word out on some online tips as you finalize your holiday shopping. The volume of consumers that turn to online shopping during the holidays provide a great incentive for scammers and phishers to entice unsuspecting victims. The more aware you are about the risks that you can be exposed to online, the safer you will be.

To help get you through the holidays safely, here are some simple tips to help you avoid becoming a victim of cyber crime.

First and foremost, never give out your personal information. Whether it’s over the phone or online, your personal information is the one thing that cyber criminals covet the most. With it, they can attempt to exploit your good name and credit, and even worse, they can attempt to impersonate and/or misrepresent you.  Your personal information, such as your social security number should never be shared. Account numbers fall under the same concept and should never be given out over the phone or via unsolicited contact or emails. Trust me when I say that if there was a problem with your bank account, your bank would not send you an email requesting your username, password and account number. Most likely, they would place a hold on your account and force you to call them to address the issue.

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Another way to avoid being a victim of cyber crime is to use caution when using email. You should never click on a link in an email. Phishing tactics are designed to make you believe that what you are looking at in an email is legitimate. Even though the link in an email may seem like it points to your favorite store and online website, the reality is that the link could be modified to point you to a site that looks and feels like the real thing. The moment you enter a username and password to check your account, you’ll have inadvertently provided the cyber criminals with your credentials and unknowingly given them access to your account.  The easiest way to avoid phishing tactics is to not click on links in an email. By doing so, you eliminate the threat posed to you and your personal information. If you are curious about an offer received in an email, go directly to the site for confirmation instead of clicking on the link provided.

Lastly, if you indeed decide to shop online, make sure that before you enter any financial account information on a website, that you are accessing a secure web page. Any site that asks you to enter payment options should be doing so using encryption. The most common type used online is Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL. I won’t bore you with the details, but if you are about to enter payment info, and you don’t see an “HTTPS” in the browser, or a small lock on the lower right corner of the browser, then you should avoid the site.

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If by chance you do find that you have become a victim of cyber crime, the Internet Crime Complain Center provides some tips on what you should do. Contacting your financial institute would also be a good idea.

I hope you all have a great holiday season and a Happy New Year! See you in 2012.

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