Simple steps to stay safe paying over the internet

Published on Sunday 27 April 2008 21:55

ASK THE SCOTSMAN

Q: I MUST be one of the few people who has never paid for anything over the internet.

However, I need to do this soon, and was wondering what the levels of risk might be and what steps I could take to reduce the chances of falling victim to fraudsters.

Name & address supplied

A: The industry body for card payments, ACAS, has a very useful guide which you can access and print off at via http://tinyurl.com/4kh35v

Figures from the Association for Payment Clearing Services (Apacs) showed a 25 per cent increase in card fraud to 535.2 million last year.

Of this, 290.5 million was "card not present", ie fraud by phone, internet or mail order, a rise of 37 per cent on the year before.

The rise in overall card fraud is being mainly driven by criminals working overseas using stolen UK card details, it said.

Earlier this month a report by the web security company Symantec revealed that bank account details were selling for as little as 5 apiece as part of a thriving trade in stolen information being carried out on the internet.

Consumers are advised never to let cards out of their sight and to check receipts and bank statements thoroughly.

They are also advised to take the drastic step of shredding all card receipts – disturbingly, a card receipt is all a clever fraudster needs to produce a replica card.

You are at most at risk when the fraudster can easily guess your card's personal identification number, or Pin. Avoid using easily traceable facts about yourself, such as your date of birth, as your Pin.

In addition, have a different Pin for each card. It may be a pain to remember all the numbers, but it will make the job of the fraudster very difficult indeed.

There are two new payment systems in the pipeline which claim to make it easier and safer to shop online, by letting you pay for goods directly from your bank account without having to hand over card details.

The POLi and eWise systems, launched last month, offer the option to pay directly from a bank account at supporting online retailers' checkout pages.

Shoppers selecting the option are automatically taken to their bank's log-in page, where after they have manually logged in, a page appears on which the necessary payment fields are "pre-populated" with the correct amount and the retailer's bank account details.

Once the consumer has accepted the purchase, the funds are transferred and the retailer is given a confirmation code so they can ship the goods.

The companies behind each system claim this process of being automatically directed to a bank account gets around the problem of people either not having cards or not wanting to type in their card numbers on a merchant's site.

However, no British bank has yet agreed to work with either payment system and, without access to the banks, the crux of the potential security risk each system poses is that users need to download software to allow POLi and eWise to fill out payment forms on their behalf – creating new opportunities for fraudsters.