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5 Tips to Prevent Business Credit Card Fraud
5 Tips to Prevent Business Credit Card Fraud..---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1. Safeguard Your Card One of the most important things to remember is to keep your card safe. You do not ever want to lend your card out to anyone in your business whom you cannot trust completely. In most cases, you will want to keep the card in your sight at all times. Most of the time, credit card fraud takes place when someone the cardholder knows takes advantage of the card. Therefore, you should be very cautious about letting anyone have your card for any reason. 2. Protect Your StatementYou should also make every effort to protect your credit card statement. Typically, your credit card statement is going to have you a credit card account number on it somewhere. This means that you do not want to leave your statement around where anyone can find it. If you plan on keeping your statements, you should keep them in a filing cabinet that you can lock. If you do not plan on keeping them, you should run them through a shredder or destroy them in some other way. 3. Do Not Save PasswordsIf you regularly access your credit card account online, you should not save your password to log in. Many people automatically save all their passwords on their computers so that they will not have to type them in every time. Although this might be easier, it can also cause serious problems for you in the future. Anyone that gets on your computer could then have access to your credit card account. They could take a number and use it to purchase items online. 4. Report Missing CardsIf you ever find yourself in a situation where you cannot find your card, you should immediately notify the credit card company. Many people put this off because they think that they have simply misplaced the card and will find it later. However, the card could be stolen, and someone could be using it to make multiple purchases. If you cannot find your credit card, you need to notify the card company immediately. They will shut it off. This way, you will not be liable for any of the charges a thief makes on your credit card account. 5. Shopping OnlineMany businesses now choose to purchase their supplies and equipment online. While this is extremely convenient, it can also add an element of risk. There are many fraudulent websites out there that are designed to take advantage of unsuspecting customers. Make sure that you shop only with well-known merchants and those that offer leading Web security technology. How Safe Is it to Apply for Credit Cards Online? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There's a lot of talk about the safety (or lack of safety) when purchasing items with your credit card online – but what about the application process used to get the card in the first place? How safe is it to provide your personal details through an online credit card application? Secure e-commerce technology is actually considered safer than mailing your paper application through the United States Postal Service! Think about it for a minute: when you place something into the mail, you probably drop it in your mailbox and carry on with your day. Maybe you drop it in a big blue mailbox on the corner of the busy intersection you walk by on your way to work each morning. How difficult would it be for someone to stick their hand in and pull the envelope out of a home mailbox? Not difficult at all. It would be a little harder to take mail from the public mailboxes, but it's still possible by an enterprising criminal! If your mail makes it into the post office, it is then handled by a number of postal workers. True, there are cameras and laws regarding how the mail is handled – but we know that there are dishonest people in the world and it's possible that one may be working in your local post office. Slipping a piece of mail into their pocket would not be completely out of the question – and it just might be your credit card application, containing all of your personal data. The security used for online credit card applications include: Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Technology: This encrypts the information sent between your computer and the bank's computer via the Internet. So the personal information you type into an online credit card application form is sent in a jumbled mess that the bank computer knows how to UN jumble and put back together for human readers to understand. If someone tried to intercept the transmission of your credit card application, they would receive the encrypted, jumbled version. What Is Encryption? For math-lovers out there, encryption is actually a mathematical process that camouflages the information to 128-bits. Remember when you were a kid, and you would create secret languages with your friends so no one else could read your notes? You maybe reversed the alphabet, so A would actually be Z and Z would become A.... or you shifted everything over three letters and then wrote your note using your new alphabet. This is elementary level encryption. When a computer encrypts your personal data, it takes each character you enter and transforms it into another character, in any one of 2 to the 128Th power ways. The code would take 20,000 years to break using today's' computers. Two Key Algorithms: Additionally, the encryption method uses a two-key algorithm. This means there is a public and private key that have to be used to “unlock” the encrypted data. These keys are required by the computer sending the information (the computer you use to fill out and submit your online credit card application), and the computer receiving the information (the bank's computer) in order to unscramble and read the 128-bit encrypted personal data of your credit card application. A criminal intercepting an encrypted message not only has the impossible mathematical encryption to deal with; but he or she would also then need to have the public and private keys to “unlock” it. |
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