| If
you take a few simple precautions,
there’s no reason why shopping
on the Internet shouldn’t be
as safe as buying something from a
catalogue or any other sort of shop.
Before you buy, have a good look around
the website you’re buying from.
It’s not difficult for someone
to set up a website and make it look
good but there are certain features
that all decent online shops have.
These include:
-
Information such as address, telephone
number and email address.
- How
much it’ll
cost to deliver the things you’ve
bought and how they are going to
be sent to you.
- What to do if
you want to return something.
- A privacy
policy telling you what happens
to any personal
details you give.
- A ‘secure’ way
of paying. This means that
the information you
give is scrambled into
a code before it is sent over the
Internet and
is then stored in a secure
database. If
a site is secure it will
show a small padlock at the bottom
of the
screen
when you are filling
in your payment details. The address
bar at the top of the page will also
read 'https://....' instead of just
'http://....'. The 's' tells you
that the site you are using is secure.
To help keep online shopping safe,
you should also:
- Never
send your card details by email
when you are paying for something
because emails aren’t secure.
- Remember
to keep a record of what you’ve bought, for example
your order number, the items you’ve
bought and how much they cost. This
information should all be in the
confirmation email that the shopping
site will send to you once you’ve
completed your order so print off
a copy and keep it safe.
- Check
your credit card and bank statements
regularly.
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