Festive shopping on mind – here are safety tips for online shopping.

It’s the festive time of the year and many of you may be thinking of purchasing things online. In today’s busy world it is always convenient to buy things online. This is the time when the online fraud is also on the rise. Lot of “fly by night” business website started to appear. These untrustworthy business websites appears and disappears very quickly with products offerings that do not have quality and/or service.

Most of the fraudulent websites come up during this time of the year and collect personal and credit card information. They have the look and feel of a legitimate website with all the false logos and claims listed on the home page. Cyber criminals behind these website use lot of techniques to direct users to their fake websites. Techniques like advertisements on major search engines, fraudulent search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. They also go to the extent of diverting traffic to their website with the help of a botnet or other malwares.

It is always good to be cautions when doing online purchase and avoid falling in trap and doing online purchasing only on legitimate websites. Below are some of the tips that will help you to identify legitimate website:

1. Check for sings that indicate the business is legitimate and buy from reputable stores. Do not choose not so popular websites that are offering impossible discounts. You must check the reviews about the website on other third party websites (eg. epinions.com, resellerratings.com, mouthshut.com, etc.).

2. When you have selected the online store visit the website directly, rather than relying on search engines. You can use search engine to check out company information and site ratings and customer reviews.

3. When submitting credit card information make sure the website address of that page starts with https. The last “s” in the https is very important to ensures that the website is encrypting your data while on transit on internet. This can also be verified by checking if there is a small lock icon which is closed on the status bar. Some browsers show the closed lock sing on address bar as well.

4. Make sure your web browser is up-to-date. In case you are using IE 8 it provides additional protection for SSL certified websites. The address bar turns green and shows the closed padlock.

5. Use credit cards instead of debit card. For multiple online shopping try to use single credit card instead of multiple credit cards

6. Keep record of all the transactions you make using credit card.

7. The most important thing is to make sure that your operating system and your Quick Heal protection is up to date.

8. Look for the warnings by Quick Heal Browsing Protection that prevents you from visiting compromised or fraudulent websites.

Wish you all happy and safe festive shopping!