Throughout
life we sometimes have to overcome frustrations and obstacles. You can’t have
the rainbow without the rain, right? But some of those frustrations and
obstacles are avoidable. I find those are probably the most irritating ones to
go through because you blame yourself for not preventing them, especially when
it comes to financial fraud.
Having
your financial information targeted and utilized against you or for fraud
purposes is something that so many people go through, unfortunately. It’s hard
to have to stop your life completely when mysterious charges appear, or when
loans are being taken out in your name. After all, financial stability is the
number one goal for most people who wish for any kind ofquality of life, not to mention the
time it takes to deal with it the issues of getting the charges taken off and
getting cards cancelled and new ones issued and more!
While
you should always contact your bank, the police, a financial watchdog or a
lawyer if experiencing an issue like this (and for the most part will have the
issue resolved), taking some steps to avoid this in the first place is a very
smart idea. So I am sharing some tips today about how to help you avoid getting
your identity and/or bank information stolen.
Use Trustpilot
Trustpilot
is an effective website that helps you learn just how legitimate an online
brand is before you shop with them. Not everyone can or wishes to shop with
Amazon (however popular it may be), and so to find alternatives can sometimes
be a hard task depending on what item you wish for. Using certain search
engines such as Google Shopping cannot be perfect each and every time,
sometimes leading to untrustworthy or insecure vendors. Trustpilot can give you
rating out of five stars regarding how trustworthy a certain business is, and
it can be important to pay heed to this should you wish for the best potential
outcome.
Purchase Legitimately
It’s
also important to search for legitimate purchases where you can, as even pop-up
stores sellingcounterfeit sunglassescan be a prospective
fraud possibility. Additionally, only dealing with online retailers that have
valid payment methods (services such as PayPal are a good sign) can show that
you have a secure financial link. Just remember – if a deal seems too good to
be true, it usually is. And the cheaper something is, the more likely you are
to pay for it later, however that may be.
Check Your Statement
When
your card information is taken advantage of, a prospective fraudster will try
to move quickly to use your information in the quickest manner possible to
avoid detection. This also means that the longer you leave it, the less chance
you have of getting your money back or reporting the issue to the police well.
Checkingyour statementeach day, or every
other day, and reporting or following up on questionable payments can be a
truly important measure, potentially giving you the chance to catch issues as
they happen. We try to do this and it has helped us find issues several times.
Now we pay an annual fee for our bank to look into odd charges and sometimes
have to pre-authorize purchases. But it’s far easier to pre-authorize than to
deal with the fall out of a fraud!
I hope this helps you
avoid becoming a financial victim!
