Six Gift Shopping Tips to Keep Your Personal Information Safe

Tips for Gift Shopping Online

1. It's always safer to use your home computer. Just be a little wary of computers in public areas. There could be spyware on them that gives other users access to your financial information.

2. Type in the retailer's online web address rather than clicking through a link in an e-mail from the retailer. This will prevent you from being reeled in by a "phisher". A "phisher" uses a fake Web address and e-mail that pretends to be a real site. What may happen is, if you click "reply" on one of these phony e-mail messages, you are sent to the phony site where crooks can steal your passwords and financial information.

3. Always look for the padlock or a color bar at the bottom of an online retailer's Web site. This way you know that the information you enter is encrypted so no one can copy it.

4. Use more complex passwords and save them in a password manager. Using this software makes it easy to store multiple passwords. With it you only have to remember only one master password. How does a password manager work? You download it and it sits safe and secure on your browser along with the web address of your login pages. The first time you sign into an account of any kind the password manager asks if you want to save your username and password. You then give the username/password combination a name so you can locate it in the password manager.

5. You can use a single use credit card number. This is an excellent idea. Citibank, Bank of America, and Discover offer these numbers to cardholders. It's called the ShopSafe program. How it works is that you receive a number that is linked to your account but is not your actual credit card number. It keeps your true account number off the Web and out of merchant databases by generating a random, substitute number in its place.

6. Top search engine results are much more secure sites than those further down the list. If you're doing searches on the internet it's better to select sites higher up the list as possible on the first page of results.

Gift shopping is definitely a pleasure and convenience. If you follow these few tips, you'll have extra peace of mind knowing that your personal information is safe and secure.

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