Retail
Only purchase from reputable sites
Look for the padlock in the address bar before buying anything online
Handle your card yourself when buying in person (rather than handing it to someone)
Always borrow money from pessimists, they never expect it back
Imagine you’re walking through a market place and someone opens their coat displaying a series of ‘watches of questionable origin’. Most of us wouldn’t buy them, but if we decided to, how many of us would then trust that someone to take our credit card away to ‘take the payment’? Not many I’m sure, but like so many other things in cyberspace, these seemingly laughable situations are effectively what we expose ourselves to day after day.
It’s worth remembering that many of the scams and risks online are not new, with con men women people artists and criminals exploiting people many years before the internet was created. Vigilance and common sense are often the best weapons of self-defence.