Credit card fraud is rampant these days. Are you at risk?
I’m Denise O’Berry and you’re watching the “Little Big Show.”
Your place for bite size tips that can have a big impact on your bottom line.
I’ll never forget the day that I saw all sorts of fraudulent purchase receipts pop
into my e-mail box. It’s one of those stomach-wrenching moments
when you really can’t believe what’s happening. But it does happen and it happens pretty much
every single day to someone around the world. Okay so let me first say, I absolutely believe
that it’s safe to purchase things online. I buy just about every single week one thing
or another. I actually think it’s more dangerous to
hand your credit card over to someone that’s going to go into some back dark room and process
it. I’ve had fraud happen to me that way too.
So let’s talk about what happened to me. My e-mail notifier popped up on my telephone
telling me that I had several e-mails waiting. When I went in to check, I had seven order
receipts from my PayPal account. Now, no one uses that account but me; so I
knew something was wrong. When I opened the e-mails, oh my goodness,
I nearly got sick to my stomach. The receipts were for purchases from the iTunes
store and totaled about $300. The really bad part about this is I only keep
a minimum amount in my PayPal account, typically $200, so the purchases had started to come
out of my connected bank account. Now it would have been real easy to panic
but I didn’t. The first thing I did was log into my iTunes
account and changed my password, then I cancelled my billing agreements, so that no automatic
billing could take place. Then I did the same thing with my PayPal account.
That totally stopped the flow. So then I went about cleaning up the mess,
working to get my money back for those fraudulent purchases.
It took a little bit but things finally got settled and I ended up getting a refund for
every single item. So you can learn a lesson from what happened
to me. Here are three key things you need to remember.
#1 and I know you’ve heard this a zillion times but your first line of defense is your
password. There’s still people that are so lax with
their passwords and you know what? I was guilty but not anymore.
Don’t use standard passwords on any account. One that you use over and over and over again.
I had a bad habit of when I initially signed up for a new account, I’d use a standard
password and then go in and change it to a secure password.
Hmm, well, you know what, I hadn’t done it on my iTunes account and as a result I
got hacked but that doesn’t happen anymore. Okay, #2, don’t set up billing agreements.
You know it really was a convenience thing to have my iTunes account attached to my PayPal
account, but that means that anybody who gets my iTunes password can make a purchase, which
is exactly what happened. So I definitely do not recommend billing agreements
with anybody, if you can avoid it. And #3, change your passwords on a regular
basis. You know that could be monthly.
It could be every three months. It could be every six months.
I’m a little bit paranoid about it now, so I change mine a lot and I use a password
manager that really helps. You can find a link to the one that I use right
down below. So there you go.
That’s my story about online credit card fraud.
Don’t let it happen to you. There are people that live in this world to
steal those kind of things from us and we need to put up every line of defense that we can
to protect ourselves. Have you ever been a victim of credit card
fraud? Please share your lessons learned in the comments
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your business. Thank you so much for watching.
I’ll see you next week.