That's because
a great deal of credit card fraud is caused by retail sales
employees who handle card numbers. E-commerce systems remove
temptation by encrypting the numbers on a company's servers.
For merchants, e-commerce is actually safer than opening
a store that could be looted, burned, or flooded. The difficulty
is in getting customers to believe that e-commerce is safe
for them.
Consumers don't
really believe it yet, but experts say e-commerce transactions
are safer than ordinary credit card purchases. Every time
you pay with a credit card at a store, in a restaurant,
or over an 800 number--and every time you throw away a credit
card receipt--you make yourself vulnerable to fraud.
But ever since
the 2.0 versions of Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet
Explorer, transactions can be encrypted using Secure
Sockets Layer (SSL), a protocol that creates a secure
connection to the server, protecting the information as
it travels over the Internet. SSL uses public key encryption,
one of the strongest encryption methods around. A way to
tell that a Web site is secured by SSL is when the URL begins
with https instead of http.
Browser makers
and credit card companies are promoting an additional security
standard called Secure
Electronic Transactions (SET). SET encodes the credit
card numbers that sit on vendors' servers so that only banks
and credit card companies can read the numbers.
No e-commerce system
can guarantee 100-percent protection for your credit card,
but you're less likely to get your pocket picked online
than in a real store.
