Beware Of Dangerous Online Shopping In The New Year

As the New Year approaches you may be busy finding the best shopping website for that special deal that you always waited for, but are you doing that safely?

Theoretically, Cyber Monday is the biggest online shopping day of the year. In reality, intense online shopping started on Black Friday and will continue right up until the last possible day when you can still have something shipping in time for Christmas.

As we all know that vacation season is the time when you find a lot of traffic on every major shopping websites. In reality, there will be intense shopping and this will continue until Mid-January. The e-commerce website just wants to make sure you don’t miss out on anything.

Guess you had been waiting for this time to hit the online shopping website for all the wonderful offers they give, but the stakes are higher during this time because online criminals know that more people shop online at this time.

Here is few step you should keep in mind when you hit the online website and pay for the product, also ensure that your identity and your money is safe and beyond.

Crosscheck the email deals

Your email must be overflowing with incredible and unbelievable offers and holiday deals. Most of it is good and pretty good, but before you hit the action button, please keep this in mind that there are all chances of spam and phishing in there.

Emails that look genuine are actually phishing and you have to be very careful because the idea is to get you to click on a dubious link that will plant a malware on your computer to steal your personal information. Most of the links may look like they are leading to some popular shopping website, but when you click the URL, it may directly take you to the website directly through your browser using the link.

You can manage the flow of shopping email by setting up the email address with your preferred websites. This will immensely cut down the number of phishing emails in your inbox.

Look for secure websites

You are most likely to visit a dozen websites to shop during New Year eve, so ensure that before you feed in the details of credit card and other financial details, see the lock icon and the word “Secure” next to the URL of the website. This will ensure that the website is genuine and the information shared will be handled safely.

Strong password

Beware, When Shopping Online during New Year Season. We know you want to shop quickly, but do not take the shortcut of using the same password for all your Cyber Monday and holiday shopping sites.

You may be more willing to shop quickly, but such enthusiasm may lead you to risk if you are going with the same password on all the shopping websites. Create a unique and strong password with special characters. If possible use password manager like 1Password, LastPass, or Keychain to create a strong unique password.

Credit Card Management

Ensure that you do not use your debit card for shopping. Use your credit card with a level of protection between you and the shopping website. You may not know how many places have been hacked in the past years. If you are using your debit card chances are your entire account will be finished. Credit cards are like if there is a dubious transaction you can still verify and cancel the deal or block it from being used further.

Strong Software

If you are using your laptop, desktop or mobile, make sure your device has strong security software which is updated with the recent patches. This is because you are most likely to encounter unknown websites with the best shopping offer, and behind such luring, the offer stands an intruder who is ready to make his move with a click. So have security software that will keep unknown intruders at bay.

Do not reveal much

Most shopping websites ask for details that may not be relevant to them, like credit card information, birth date, with an offer to gift the recipient. Set up the account with the online retailer, and that way you need not have to only buy at that website, but find other websites to shop for your favorite deals.

Search securely and safely

Searching for deals through Google, Bing and deal aggregation sites are a time-honored way of scoring the best price on your most-coveted gifts, but it’s also a hotbed of bad or at least sketchy links. The search engines will do a good job of steering you away from bad links, but aggregation sites are simply scrapping the Internet for products and pricing. Some of the bad guys know this and have set up sites that will look like shopping destinations but may be identity thieves in disguise. One clear signal that these sites are not safe is that they will lack the security lock icon. Another is when they’re hosted outside the U.S. So, take a good hard look at those Cyber Monday shopping URLs.

So this New Year Eve keep a close watch and ensure the website is authenticate in every manner, so you can have a happy shopping session.