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The Internet has made our lives easy, especially in the field of online buying and selling, but with simplicity come greater challenges. One of the main issues that come with shopping online is its security concerns. So far this year, more than a thousand shoppers in Australia alone have reported cases of online shopping fraud, and 56.6 percent of those cases come with massive financial losses.

As the Internet has become our daily tool for trading, investing, and consuming content, we cannot stop buying and selling online, although we are at risk of phishing from scammers who get richer by defrauding users, so we can do a lot to prevent our money from being stolen and defrauded. Buying from various online stores.

This article provides practical advice for smart shopping online. These tips are classified into two parts:

1- Prevention Tips - How to protect yourself from fraud and deception while shopping on the Internet?

2- Tips - What do you do after being deceived?

1- How to protect yourself from deception and fraud while shopping on the Internet?

The next time you visit an e-commerce store, the first security check you do is move your eyes to the address bar on the upper-left side of the webpage. Examine the page URL. Is it HTTP or HTTPS?

HTTPS means that any information you enter into the site (for example, username and password, financial data, or credit card details) will be encrypted and protected from interception or eavesdropping by malicious parties.

You do not want to do business with untrusted websites, which are sites with many hackers and cybercriminals, or that sell fake products that deceive users. You want to deal with trusted sites. So how do you know if a site is reliable or not?

You must review it yourself. Before you buy anything from an online retail store, first do a background check on the site you want to buy from. Or more real, search Google for any site you want to work with. To see if other shoppers have used it, critically review their feedback. There are several review sites, but a great place to start is the Better Business Bureau. When doing the review, smart shoppers are interested in answering the following questions:

- Are your peers buying from the site?

What has been their experience so far?

Is the experience good or bad?

You should also focus on these basic questions. They will help keep you from getting scammed while shopping on the internet.

Are the contact details on the website real?

You may want to check the contact details of the site you are shopping on. As a general rule, nearly all companies have their contact details - especially their email address, address, and phone number - on the "Contact" page of their site. You can use this information to confirm whether the retail store is original or fake.

Well, you don't want to travel miles to confirm his office address, but you can easily look up his phone number in the phone search directory to locate him, confirm the name of the number's owner, and compare the information you see with what you see on their contact page.

If there is a match, this does not guarantee that the site is real because the fraudster copied the contact information from the real site, but if the information does not match, you know right away that the site is not trusted, or at least some investigation is done. 

- Always check user reviews

There is an obvious reason behind the fact that the biggest sellers on the internet, like eBay, have a reviews section. This is done so that the new buyers can be sure that they are dealing with a trustworthy person or company and that previous sales have been made without problems. So make sure you get a clear opinion based on the reviews before you buy something online.

Don't give out too much information.

The only information that an online purchase should require is your credit card details, address, and phone number. If the site asks you for anything extra, like your Social Security number, you must be suspicious.

- Check out the photos of the products shown

When making a purchase online there is always a risk that the product image does not belong to the seller and may have been fetched from the Internet. And maybe when your purchased product arrives, you may find it completely different from what you expect. The solution here is to ask the seller to send you a tagged image. It could be a piece of paper with their name and the date of the day or something else you require. If they don't, then this is a big reason for you to suspect something is wrong.

- Check out the seller's website

Check the seller's website thoroughly to make sure it looks professional. Where most fake websites look a bit weird, they contain typos, low-quality images of products, etc., and are always excessive for words like "cheap" Professional sellers call these things "great deals."

Read the site's privacy policy.

Reputable companies always have a page on their website that addresses their privacy policy. It is extremely important to research this to ensure that the company will only use your data for purchases and anything else. Even the most trustworthy companies can use your email for advertising reasons, and some of them may pass your data to third parties.

- Check your consumer rights on the merchant site.

Online sellers are required to provide you with clear and correct information about your rights as a consumer. For example, your right to obtain a guarantee that the item will arrive at a specified time or a legal guarantee for the goods offered. If a trader doesn't have anything like this mentioned on their website, consider not buying anything from there.

Don't be fooled by the very cheap goods

Everything in our world has a price. If one of the products on the shopping site is too cheap, you should be suspicious of something. Of course, there can be big sales. However, if the retailer is not popular and does not have a good reputation, do not take the risk as this is the main way that fraudsters attract your attention.

Pay using a secure method of payment

When you pay for something online, you must follow the following three golden rules:

- Always pay on a secure page (it displays a lock or a key logo and a URL that begins with "https").

You can pay by credit card if possible, as you can get a refund from the credit card issuer in case of fraud.

 Completely avoid direct money transfers (such as Western Union, MoneyGram, etc.).

- Always use recorded delivery.

First of all, registered delivery provides you with a tracking number in case you are away when the purchase is delivered, or if it gets lost, etc., and also requires a signature on delivery, so that you can prove whether it was received by you or not. Everything is completely covered by recorded delivery.

2- What do you do after being deceived and fraudulent when buying from the Internet?

As you can see from the previous section, it can be difficult to completely avoid fraud sites. No matter how alert you are, you may find yourself in a difficult situation.

Did you order anything, but did not receive the item that you bought?

Was your item shipped against an order?

Are there additional charges on your bill that you did not agree to?

In this section, we provide some practical tips for what to do if you've purchased a product online and get scammed

Contact your bank or credit card company right away.

If you were defrauded while making an online purchase, contact your bank or credit card company immediately. Let them know what happened, so they can take action to protect your money in the future.

Your bank can suspend the reservation on your account and debit card. Your credit card company can block your card. Many finance companies also offer fraud protection, which covers some fees that were made without your consent, but you must report errors immediately.

Submit a complaint if you purchased from one of the trusted websites

File a complaint if you've purchased on a marketplace, such as eBay or Amazon. Most of the online marketplaces have a good reputation, so this will help you to investigate the culprit and get your stolen money back or receive the product accordingly.

- Get your money back.

Some online shoppers completely lose hope, thinking that they will never get their money back after being scammed. While it can be difficult to get your money back to you after being separated from you online, there are some opportunities to get your money back.

For example, if you ordered a product from an e-commerce retail store with a PayPal account and your order was not delivered, PayPal Buyer Protection can cover you. However, there are limits to what they can do. If the fraudster sets up a disguised clone of the PayPal payment form that just extracted your bank account details, you will not have PayPal Buyer Protection. Keep this in mind any time you shop online.

Another thing to remember is the benefit of using credit cards versus debit cards. As mentioned earlier, both banks and credit card companies have certain protections against fraud. However, if the fraud does occur in your bank account, the funds will likely be withdrawn from your account when the order passes and you will have to wait for the costs to be refunded. A credit card can act as a buffer - an extra step between fraudulent charges and you actually have to pay them - and many cards offer some kind of purchase protection in such cases.

This was the most important information that you must know before you make any purchase of a product over the Internet. I hope that the article will inform you, if you like it, share it with your friends. Total Security Protect your pc from viruses download it.