One of the biggest reasons people get serious about their cyber safety is that they are concerned about different financial schemes online. Most of us keep all the essential data backed up and online. Financial information is no exception. While shopping online is one of the best things to come out of the internet, it is also riddled with risks and uncertainty. Whenever you enter your credit card information into a new website, you risk losing your money. But since online shopping is so convenient and easy most of us are willing to ignore its downsides. In reality, financial scams that happen online are no joke, and taking extra steps to ensure our financial information is safe is the least we can do. Using a VPN is one of the ways to make using credit cards online safer.
What is a VPN
VPN, or a virtual private network, is a tool designed to safeguard your IP address and online activity from cyber attacks and snoopers. If you look up my IP address, you will likely discover that it is unprotected unless you use a VPN. You can choose to connect to one of the many servers located in different parts of the world. When you connect to one of the VPN servers, if anyone tries to figure out your actual IP address, they will only be able to see the VPN server’s IP address. The user and the server exchange also gets encrypted so no one can tie your online activity back to you and your actual IP address. One of the common misconceptions is that no one can see what you are doing online. In actuality, your internet service provider (ISP) can always see your online activity, even if you use private browsing mode. They frequently sell this data to third parties for some profit and rarely check what happens with the data afterward. This is why having a VPN is a great tool to reclaim your online privacy and browse the web on your own terms.
What are the risks of using a credit card online?
The biggest threat to your credit card is inputting information into an illegitimate website. More than plenty of fraudulent e-commerce websites scam people out of their credit card information and then drain their accounts. Online shopping has come a long way, but cyber security experts have yet to figure out a way to eradicate websites like that. You can do certain things like extra pay attention to the website URLs to ensure that you didn’t accidentally end up at the wrong website. Many of these fraudulent e-commerce platforms will take names almost identical to famous shopping platforms to scam people who make accidental typos when trying to go to the original website. You can also look up reviews of the website you want to use the credit card on to ensure that they are legitimate.
Is it safe to use credit cards with a VPN
Using your credit cards online is safer when you are also connected to the VPN server. This is because financial fraud can often escalate, and if you are not protected, the hacker could find other personal information through your IP address. Granted, if you enter your credit card details into a fraudulent website, there is very little a VPN can do to protect your financial assets after that. But in other cases, when you might be using public Wi-Fi, it can help prevent the attempted attacks. If you have your credit card information on your device and connect to a compromised public network, it will be possible for the intruder to snoop out your credit card information.
On the other hand, if you use a VPN when using a public network, the hackers won’t be able to find your actual address and will instead get stuck with the VPN server. In this way, using credit cards online is safer when you are using them while connected to a VPN server. Although you should practice caution when using credit cards online because, once that information gets into the wrong hands, there’s very little anyone can do.
