Afraid of Credit Card Fraud?: Here are the preventive measures

Zee Media Bureau/Smriti Srivastava

New Delhi: If you are a credit card user, the word that haunts you the most is - DECLINE. Facing the terror of decline while using credit card means either you are spending so much money that you have maxed out its limit or you have been victimized by the 'horror' of credit card fraud. In this era of digitization, it has become nearly impossible to differentiate between a genuine procedure from the fraud one.

Our ears have become quite used to listening bizarre stories of outrageous frauds that happen often. But if we dig down to the situation and analyse, it can be said the fraud could have been avoided at some point if most of them had been careful. According to an analysis, on an average, police registers atleast one fraud case of debit/credit card in urban areas. Out of these crimes, many are committed by tricking the victims into revealing their credit card information over some fake phone call.

Some of them carry out the misdeed by promising a reward, others by frightening the potential subject into spitting out the information. Also, hackers break into other's personal information from database of shopping website or by stealing precious credit cards. Just because companies do not want to risk their reputation by sporting their cyber security failure, many of these crimes go unreported.

Therefore, the question arises - what can we do about it? How can we prevent credit card fraud?

Here is a list of safety measures you can follow in order to avoid banking frauds:

1. Sharing of personal information should be avoided. Any genuine call from bank will never ask for your pin or OTP over phone conversation. Or, if in some case, you are extremely confused about it, better visit the branch to do the needful.​

2. While using a public network, always clear your login id, password whenever you are signing into shopping, email site to protect your online information.

3. Credit card is more preferable than debit card when shopping online. In such worse situation, you can freeze your credit card and report fraud much faster than on a latter one.

4. Phishing is a trick in which pop-ups or spam emails mimic actual banks or businesses and obtain your personal details, taking advantage of which they can carry out the misdeed. One should be beware of phishing to avoid such condition.

5. Keep a check on your credit card and account statements and track of the expenses, to make sure if they match. Any mismatch in the record or the activity which you are not in habit of doing, would raise your eye-brows.

6. Any kind of document that contains your personal information or old documents - like old bank statements or copies of your old passport, which are no more in use should be torn up or decomposed properly.