Internet Fraud

I have 2 credit cards I use regularily. I pay them off monthly and I really have no need for credit. However I enjoy the convienance of a card to use at gas pumps and for shopping online. But in the past 3 months BOTH of my cards have been victims of fraud online. Basically someone has gotten my card number and bought stuff online with it. I am not out any money , but it is very frustrating. I'm concerned that the more this happens the more my money is at risk. I've told my husband we have no reason to use credit cards so we are going to pay cash for everything we buy in person. But what about online purchases? Shopping online is a big part of my life - I live in the city and don't like driving to the burbs to shop. I also have a few hobbies that basically require you to purchase things online because I can't get them locally. Are there decent alternatives to not using a credit card online? Please don't mention debit card - no way I'm entering that number online. Why is a paypal credit card more safe than any other VISA or Mastercard from a major bank? I know for a fact that one of the recent frauds was not from my error, but because a small business that I deal with had their system hacked. The guy that owns the business is a friend of mine and I've talked to him. Not sure about the second fraud cause Mastercard wouldn't tell me what happened, but I suspect it was something similar (but not my friend's company). The credit card companies actually appraoched me with the problem and automatically shut down my cards and sent out replacements.

More and more online merchants are accepting paypal as a form of payment. Paypal is very secure, so I would open a paypal account. You can use your bank account or a credit card with paypal. (Or both.) If you visit the paypal site, I believe it has a section which lists merchants who accept paypal. As far as the fraud aspect of your questions goes, it sounds like you have a problem with your computer security. Do you have a firewall? Try to secure your computer as much as possible and don't use a public computer (such as one at the library) or your computer at work to shop from. Good luck!

uuuhhh, don't save your credit card info on sites you use!!!!

Paypal is very secure in my opinion and I think you can just use your checking account number for that. Also many places you can buy gift cards in advance to use for online purchases. Also make sure you use a very good anti-virus/trojan/adware protection software. Don't use norton...my husband says that's one of the worst and he is very experienced in working with computers and software. I recommend katperski, bitdefender and symantec. You may want to take your computer in somewhere to have it reinstalled (with backup for your files) to get a clean slate since you have already had fraud problems.

Your problem is simple. Get a Paypal credit card to use online, they are secure. Then use a debit card for everything else. It works for me.

Report both of them lost and this way they will issue you new ones. I keep my privacy up to high at all times, unless the website I want doesn't come up then I lower it down until it does and then immediately delete my browser history and set back to high.

MBNA Mastercard has a really nice feature that comes with it. It's called "Shopsafe". If you want to make an online purchase, you log into your MBNA account and choose the 'Shopsafe' option. You'll get a little pop-up window that will allow you to set a dollar amount limit and expiration date for just that one purchase. Then you'll get a temporary account number that works exactly like your real credit card. Use that info for shopping and you'll never have to use your real number online. For instance, if you want to buy something that costs $48.93 from 'Joe's Internet Shop of Horrors', you'd set your limit to $50 and have it expire in 2 months. If Joe tries to charge you more than $50, your card will be declined. If good old Joe tries to make another unauthorized charge in a few months, it will be declined again. That number will never work for any store other than Joe's shop. It works really well to stop any additional charges if you want to do a trial of something and have to enter a credit card first. So you'd make the limit a dollar or so over the trial price. To continue being charged, the business would have to contact you for a new number since to them, you'd be 'over the limit' for their store. My apologies to all the 'Joe's out there, I'm not trying to pick on you..... :-)