Credit card fraud is one of the most common forms of swindling today. This is because it is highly lucrative and effective. Determined fraudsters can use a lot of social engineering to get sensitive information out of victims and use it for their own gain.
Today, we will teach you 10 ways to prevent yourself from becoming a victim of credit card fraud. Let’s check them out.
1. Protect Your Physical Card
Your physical card is a very sensitive item. You cannot share it willy-nilly with anyone. Be careful when using it and take care to hide the number and security on it.
Those two pieces of information are usually enough to commit credit card fraud. Bad actors can use this information to conduct transactions and make payments to themselves.
Now, there are plenty of safeguards to help you should such a thing happen, but they are all hasslesome and take time. It is much easier to keep your physical cards safe and secret.
One new type of scam with physical cards is the use of RFID chips. Newer credit cards and debit cards have an RFID chip on them to facilitate transactions at point-of-sale(POS) systems.
Scammers can use this functionality to bring their phone or an RFID-enabled device near your card and create a transaction. They can just brush past you, and you wouldn’t realize that the transaction happened.
To protect yourself from this kind of fraud, use an RFID-protected wallet. This prevents your card from receiving or sending any signals. This ensures that your card is not used for any unauthorized transactions without your knowledge.
2. Educate Yourself On Phishing Scams
A phishing scam is an elaborate scam where a bad actor will use a spoofed email or phone number and contact under the guise of an authority. This authority is usually your bank.
In the fake correspondence, the scammer somehow entices you into clicking a link to a fake website. The fake website looks identical to a real one. For example, it could be your bank portal, or it could be the login page to your wallet app.
When the victim enters their information into that site, it gets stolen. This can include your credit card information as well.
Some elaborate scams will send you a new, fake credit card number and ask you to log in to your bank to activate it. Now, your wallet or bank app can do this sometimes, but it is unlikely. You can verify whether emails of this nature are legitimate or not by doing the following things.
- Check the number with a Credit Card Checker. This is a tool that can verify if a CC number is legitimate or not using the Luhn algorithm.
- Before clicking on any links, check the spelling of the domain given in the URL. If the domain is misspelled or off by 1 or 2 letters, then it's a scam site and you should stay clear of it.
- If the domain name seems correct, hover over the link without clicking, and the real URL will show up. Check the domain in that link. Is it the same as your bank? If it is, the link is fine; if it is not, then stay clear of it.
You should learn about more elaborate attacks that rely on phishing to protect yourself, such as “account takeover,” “triangulation fraud,” and “synthetic ID fraud.”
3. Do Not Shop at Shady Websites
Phishing is not the only way to steal credit card information and commit fraud. One of the more popular ways of committing credit card fraud is to create an online store and operate it normally. This store could have a similar name as another brand, or it could have an original name.
Such stores use black hat methods to get on top of the search results (for a short time) and use ads to promote unreal deals. These deals and top SERP appearances work well for the short term and get a lot of traffic to the website.
Search engines do remove such sites soon, but they are still up for long enough to cause some damage.
Whoever shops at such sites gets their data stolen and later used without their knowledge. Credit card details are the number one target here because online payees need to input their details to make a purchase. So, it's easy to steal this data.
So, how do you know which website is shady and which one is not? Well, first of all, always check if the URL starts with “HTTPS.” The “S” is important because it signifies that the site is secure with SSL (Secure Socket Layer).
You can check the details of the SSL certificate by clicking on the lock icon in the URL bar. If a website doesn’t have SSL, then you shouldn’t risk your data and move on.
4. Do Not Conduct Transactions on Public WiFi
Public WiFi is a den of data leaks and theft. Anyone can connect to public WiFi, and that means anyone can use packet sniffing tools to track what others on the network are doing.
This means that if you are conducting transactions on public WiFi, a determined bad actor could catch that information and steal your data. That’s why whenever you connect to public WiFi, ensure that your traffic is encrypted.
You can use a powerful VPN to encrypt all your data so that it becomes harder to sniff the packets. However, the better solution is to avoid using public WiFi completely.
5. Always Dispose of Credit Card Statements Properly
Important documents like credit card statements contain your full credit card number and details on them. When you are done with them, you need to dispose of them in such a way that no data can be gleaned from them. This means that you have to either shred them or burn them.
If you don’t do that, then that data can be stolen by dumpster divers. Dumpster diving refers to going through other people’s trash and looking for sensitive documents. If a dumpster diver finds your credit card statement, they can effectively use your card without your consent.
So, always dispose of such documents properly to avoid becoming a victim of credit card fraud.
6. Be Wary of Skimming
Skimming is another way of stealing credit card information. It needs some technical know-how because it involves machines. A skimmer is a device that fits onto an ATM; specifically, it fits onto the card slot.
Expertly made skimmers are very well-disguised and don’t look out of place on an ATM. Unsuspecting customers use the ATM normally while the skimmer scans their entire card and sends that information to the guy who installed it.
And just like that, your credit card info is stolen. Now, modern ATM design has made it next to impossible to fit a skimmer onto them. However, places like gas stations and strip malls often have old and outdated ATMs that can easily be fitted with skimmers.
Be careful when using such ATMs. Try to pull out the card reader. If there is a skimmer on it, the skimmer will be pulled out. Better yet, don’t use such ATMs at all. Always go to a bank and use their modern ATMs for secure cash withdrawals.
7. Have a Secure PIN Code and Enable 2FA
Your credit card is not usable at ATMs without a PIN code. It is a security measure to ensure that even if your card is lost, it cannot be misused. Similarly, 2-factor Authentication (2FA) is a method that uses an email address associated with your account to send you a code to authorize transactions.
You need to ensure that both the PIN code and any codes you get from 2FA are secret and only known to you. If someone gets access to these codes, they can use your credit card anywhere. Without these codes, even if your card number and security code get leaked, it can’t be used because every transaction requires either a 2FA code or a PIN code.
Here are some precautions to do this.
- Be wary when inputting your PIN code in public. Don’t input it in view of any cameras.
- Be wary of shoulder surfing if someone is standing too close while you are inputting your code, they may be trying to look over your shoulder and memorize your PIN.
- Do not use SMS for 2FA. SMS is highly insecure, and anyone who knows how to sniff packets can intercept SMS messages and learn your 2FA code.
- Use Emails and End-to-End encrypted messaging services to get your 2FA codes. This ensures that nobody can snoop and intercept them.
8. Immediately Contact Your Bank if Unauthorized Transactions Occur
If you ever find out that your card has been used without your consent, then immediately contact your bank. Modern credit cards have protection systems where the most recent transactions can be reversed within a given amount of time.
No matter how careful you are, accidents happen, and it is possible for your card info to get stolen. Data leaks of big corporations result in hundreds of people’s data getting stolen, which often includes credit card information.
So, educate yourself on the following.
- Your bank's hotline for emergency account freezing, card freezing, and chargebacks.
- The method to block your card from your wallet or bank app.
In a pinch, you should remember how to do both of these things to limit and minimize financial troubles.
9. Ensure Your Personal Devices Don’t Have Viruses or Malware
Viruses and malware are often used to infiltrate personal devices and steal sensitive information from them. Typically, this information includes passwords and usernames. However, since we do a lot of online banking on our personal devices, sensitive information like PIN codes, login info of bank and wallet websites, and credit card numbers.
Viruses and malware can scrub your PC for this information and send it to a 3rd party who can then use it themselves or sell it on the dark web. Now, modern operating systems are quite secure. They have safeguards to catch viruses and malware before they can infect the system.
However, you can bypass these settings willingly and download and install viruses. Now, nobody in their right mind would do that knowingly or intentionally, but then you must remember phishing scams. They are designed to dupe you into doing something that you think is legit, but it really isn’t.
So be wary of fake download links that download a virus onto your computer and scrub all your data. Here’s what you can do to avoid getting duped.
- Install an Ad-blocker on your browser. U-Block Origin is one of the best ad blockers available today. Ad blockers block malicious ads from showing and hide fake download links. So, they reduce the chances of getting duped.
- Keep your antivirus software’s firewall up. Firewalls will block the download of malware and viruses, even if you were to accidentally try to.
- Keep your antivirus updated to prevent newer types of viruses from bypassing your security.
10. Don’t Save Card Info On Websites or Browsers
Websites will store cookies on your browser and store your data so that they can customize your experience. Similarly, browsers will also store login information to make your life more convenient.
Websites take this a step further and actually store your information on their servers so that they can process it and send you hyper-personalized ads and offers.
Unfortunately, this means that any data leak on the website’s end can make your data available on the dark web. So, as a rule, don’t save sensitive information on websites and your browser.
Conclusion
Those are 10 ways in which you can prevent yourself from becoming a victim of credit card fraud. Most of these steps are preventative rather than curative. In credit card fraud, prevention is far better than the cure because if your data gets compromised, it is usually too late to recoup your losses.
