How to stay safe online shopping

So Kelly, you know we all shop online, but there's some sites that you know and you use a lot, and they usually already have your credit card stored, and I use those. But every now and then, I buy things from sites that I might not be as familiar with. And it's a little bit scary, 'cause as we all know, we don't want random people running around with our credit card information or more. How do you think about that? What safeguards or what should we be thinking in the back of our minds when we're shopping?

Yeah, I agree. It's challenging because, you know, ideally, you'd start with somewhere you trust, but that isn't always an option. I think that, first off, think about something like HPS that will tell you not that they're necessarily a safe shopping site, but at least that any information you share is going to them. I'm basically saying that the site, like traffic between you and the site, is encrypted, so that you know that the site is the only people getting it.

Another thing to think about is, you know, do you have to share your credit card information? So a lot of banks now are doing what we call virtual credit card numbers. So those are basically a throwaway one-time number that they'll give you where, if it ever gets lost or charges against it that you don't want, it's not your normal credit card number, so you can kind of get rid of it, and the damage is limited to that fake one. Virtual one. So browsers like Chrome and also Android have built-in features to actually take advantage of this and make it easy for you to input your virtual number instead of your regular credit card number.

This is helpful. I thought I was actually pretty savvy. I didn't know about these virtual credit card numbers. I have to figure out how to get some of these. Super helpful. Thanks so much, Kelly.

Sure.