The holiday season is the busiest shopping time of the year. It’s also the busiest time of year for fraudsters looking to enrich their holiday by using your payment card.
Using your Visa card offers many consumer protections, including fraud detection, dispute resolution, and often, toll-free numbers to report and inactivate lost or stolen cards. With security always being top of mind for Visa, here are five ways you can help protect yourself and make the work of thieves a lot harder.
REVIEW RECEIPTS: Take a close look at purchase receipts before you sign them to make sure everything is in order.
PROTECT YOUR PIN: Carefully guard your PIN anytime you use it. When paying with a debit card, strongly consider signing instead of using a PIN. If a thief can discover your card number and PIN, his first move will be to an ATM to try to withdraw cash from your account.
COUNT THE CARDS: Keep careful track of the cards in your wallet. Report missing cards to your issuer as soon as possible.
SCAN STATEMENTS: Examine your card statements as soon as they arrive or go online to review charges. Better yet, take advantage of Visa transaction alerts available from select issuers. Set parameters for receiving an email or text alert when your card is used and keep tabs on your account activity in near real-time. See something suspicious or an unauthorized charge? Report it to the card issuer right away.
ON GUARD ONLINE: Don’t click pop-up windows or suspicious links in e-mails, even if they seem to come from people you know. These can be tricks to install spyware and steal financial information. Never send sensitive personal information to anyone unless you initiated the transaction. No legitimate online merchant, bank or Visa will make an unsolicited request for your personal information. Report any suspicious requests to your card issuer and to phishing@visa.com.
Remember: When you use Visa, you can be confident that our multiple layers of security will help prevent, detect and resolve unauthorized use of your card information. In the unlikely event you do experience fraud, Visa’s Zero Liability promise means you will never be held liable for unauthorized purchases.
For more tips and practical know-how about how to protect your account information, avoid payment card scams and resolved unauthorized card use, visit www.VisaSecuritySense.com.
Posted by: Jennifer Fischer, Head of Americas Payment System Security on November 30, 2010 at 12:39 pm
