Shopping on the Internet: how to shop safely

Why more and more people prefer to buy almost any goods and services online? First of all, we want to save money! With the development of e-commerce, customers now have the ability to compare prices online, check discounts, and choose the best deals. And now they are already moving with great speed from offline stores to online: according to GfK data for 2018, 35% of Americans have shopped online at least once in the past six months. However, criminals do not doze off and follow us. They have “modernized” and learned how to steal big money: bank cards and important electronic files.

Before the holidays the number of purchases increases exponentially, and with them the number of online thefts. “The Roskatchet Center for Digital Expertise is conducting a study of mobile apps from popular online stores, and we can already say that some apps are not secure enough and have a large number of potential vulnerabilities. The most common are insecure SSL implementations and weak hashing and encryption algorithms.

They increase the risk of compromising user logins and passwords, as well as stealing users’ personal data when using unprotected networks, such as public Wi-Fi,” says Ilya Loevsky, Deputy Head of Roskachevo.

Roskachestvo could not ignore this fact, and so on the eve of the pre-holiday shopping boom, experts have prepared 5 basic rules for safe online shopping.

The most common way to pay for your purchases at American online stores is via prepaid bank card, followed by cash, and only then by bank card upon receipt of the goods according to Yandex.ru .Marketplace and GfK for 2018 . However, not everything that most people do is right.

Rule number 1: pay for the goods after delivery

The most reliable way to save your money is to pay for the goods only after delivery by courier or self-delivery. Observance of this rule will eliminate the possibility of losing money or shopping, and will protect you from receiving poor-quality goods.

Rule #2: Get an extra or virtual card and only transfer to it the money you need to pay for a specific purchase

Where it is not possible to pay by bank card upon receipt of goods, other methods of protection work. Also most customers mistakenly use their main bank card to pay for online purchases. This way of shopping is not safe, because you have to enter all of the card details in order to pay for the product. Using the card number, CVC-code and its expiration date, the fraudsters can leave you not only without a purchase, but also without money. An additional bank card will help to avoid falling into these networks.

If you do not want to have a separate card, put the money on an electronic wallet in such payment systems as WebMoney, Yandex Money, QIWI, PayPal, with a bank card or through a payment terminal.

Rule #3: carefully check the address of the site in the browser bar before you decide to pay for the selected item

Often customers are lured to phishing sites instead of wildberries – wildberies , whose design does not differ from well-known and popular online stores, they are asked to specify the card details for transaction, and then they steal the payment information. Most often such sites are visited by those who take the risk of following a link in an email from an unknown sender, which you should not do!

Rule #4: before entering your personal and payment data, always make sure that you use a secure resource

Pay attention to the security protocol which is used to establish your connection: p> symbols should be in the beginning of the address bar in your browser

Rule #5: it is better to make purchases in web-shops from your home or work, where the access to wi-fi network is encrypted

Don’t use open wi-fi networks for shopping, as there’s a chance of a hacker who would like to get all your personal information.

Learn these rules and tell them to your family. Compliance with them will minimize the leakage of your personal and payment data and your online shopping will be safe!