Online Security & Fraud Prevention

What is online Fraud ?

When someone poses as a legitimate company to obtain personal data and fraudulently conducts transactions on your existing accounts is ONLINE FRAUD. This is often called "phishing" or "pharming" -- the most common methods of online fraud are fraudulent emails, websites, and pop-up windows, or any combination of these.


What is Phishing?

Phishing takes the form of spam e-mail asking you to divulge your user name, password, credit card number or account number.


What is Pharming?

Pharming is an activity criminals use to redirect users from legitimate websites to fraudulent ones where confidential information such as credit card and bank account numbers are requested.


Tips to prevent online fraud


1) Password Security

Create strong passwords.
Don't use words that can be found in a dictionary
Don't use the same password for every site
Do use a mix of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and at least one symbol

Use Different Passwords
Do not write down Passwords
Do not storing Passwords on Storage Devices
Do Not Send Passwords through Email



2) Browser Security

Turn Off Auto-Complete-
Make sure that the browser is set so that it does not remember your passwords. You can set that option in the settings from one of the menus. The exact location of those settings is different for each browser.

Type Your Banking Site's Address Directly-
Don't visit your banking web site from links. Always type the web address into the browser's address bar yourself. This will help reduce the chance of phishing scams where people are redirected to sophisticated fake banking web sites that can look exactly like the real thing.


Closing Your Banking Session-
Always log out of your account when you are done, and also be sure to close the browser to remove additional information that may be stored in the browser.

3) E-mail Security

Avoid opening any suspicious emails requesting your account information and/or password. If you have opened any suspicious email, do not open any attachment or link it may contain, delete it.

4) General

After successfully logging into Online Banking, be sure to check the timestamp for the last successful login & the last login date


Ensure you protect your system by having a Firewall, which protects your PC against intrusion, an Antivirus and Adware/Spyware software program with an auto update feature.