Aug 05 2009
Credit Card Security, Bad Thing Did Happen
This is the age of plastic . It’s not uncommon for the typical consumer in the western world to go weeks at a time without ever handling a coin or bill. The big question is: “How safe is all this plastic?” When you buy a sandwich for $2.95 and you hand the cashier a $5 bill, you know you haven’t been ripped off when he hands you $2.05 right then and there. But when you hand your card to a waitress at the local chain restaurant, how do you know she hasn’t taken a moment to sneak into the office and copy your card number and signature?
In response to these issues, the big credit card companies have developed more secure ways to do business. MasterCard International and Visa got together and came up with a set of guidelines called the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards. A security method that online merchants are employing is the requirement of a shipping address that matches the billing address on your credit card. This is to guard against thieves who may steal your account number but will have no access to your billing address.
This way, if your card is stolen, it can only be used to make purchases that will ship to your address. Any prospective thieves will have to pick up their orders from your mailbox, not something the average anonymity-seeking thief will want to do. There are also third party systems in place for ensuring online credit card security. VeriSign’s SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) technology is the leader in the field. VeriSign will give each merchant it conducts business with 2 “keys” (like coding alphabets), a public key and a private key. The public key is used to encrypt information, and the private key is used to decipher it.
Tags: account, address, bill, billing, Business, card, credit, method, online, payment, Safe, Secure, security, signature, SSL, Standards, thief
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