PayPal’s tips to avoid online fraud
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Narrator: Canadians love to shop and online shopping is quickly becoming the norm. Recent studies found that 40 percent of Canadians shop online and spend more than $40 billion each year. However, countless others become the victims of online fraud. The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre estimates that as much as 41 cents of every dollar lost to fraud is a result of online scams, like phishing emails and spoof websites.
PayPal Canada, an online payment processing company, has four million active accounts in Canada, with a transaction made every second.
Nicky Mezo, PayPal Canada’s head of marketing, offers tips on staying safe online.
Nicky Mezo: There are four different tips that we have for consumers. The most important, really, is to stay as safe as possible and as smart as possible just like in your offline world, it’s the same thing. You want to be as smart as possible in the way you live your life.
The first one is around using a safe password. You want to make sure you don’t use really obvious passwords, like your name, your birthday, your family members’ names. What we encourage people to do is to use a few different passwords. Maybe use one for shopping sites, one for financial sites and then one for your email accounts. This way, there’ll be a few different ones that you can remember and it won’t be too difficult to recall them. What we tell people is that by doing this, you want to make sure that you’re as safe as possible and you don’t want to, in life, be using one key to open up your car and your house and your office. It’s the same thing on the Internet: you want to have a few different passwords for a few different buckets of sites that you work with.
The second tip we have is to protect your computer. You want to make sure you have the latest Internet browser that blocks fraudulent websites. Something like Internet Explorer 7 or 8 or Firefox 3 are ones that we recommend. You also want to make sure that you have the most updated anti-virus software on your system because shopping online on an unprotected computer is really like driving without a seatbelt – you don’t want to ever be doing that.
The third tip is all around not to click on links in emails. If you’re getting an email from somebody you don’t know, never click on any of the links. Always open up a browser, make sure that it has “https”. “S” stands for “secure”. Copy that link to that secure browser. That will allow you to understand whether that link is a fraud or whether it is actually fine.
And then the fourth one is just to use common sense. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true. You want to make sure that you’re sensible about your life online, similar to your life offline in that you live it smartly.
Narrator: Despite doing your best to stay safe online, sometimes a spoof email or a phishing email can get through. If you’re not sure if an email is suspicious, Nicky says PayPal is quick to address these situations.
Nicky Mezo: For those people who do think those emails are suspicious or find a website that is suspicious, we have set up an email that’s spoof@paypal.com. Our security team reviews the emails and works with ISPs to get fraudulent sites shut down, often within two hours or less. We will respond back to anybody who emails us any suspect emails or website to let them know whether they were actually fraudulent or whether they were fine.
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