Fraudsters can make your life unsafe and miserable by stealing your user ID and password with an intelligent guess and then make you a victim of cyber crime.
In order to safeguard you from these fraudsters, banks have employed multiple layers of security measures and interfaces. Even then it’s better for you to be aware of various kinds of threat or fraud to make your online banking experience safe and convenient. By choosing right options of banking online you can be safe from all these fraudsters.
Avoid suspected Emails pretending to be your banker
Fraudsters could send you cleverly drafted emails to conceive you for disclosing your personal details like bank account, debit card number and other sensitive materials to reset your password.
They can send you emails pretending to be a bank official and after disclosing your details to them they will access your account and will do whatever they want.
Please remember that your bank will never ask you for your personal details over phone or emails. You need to carefully monitor your emails and before performing any other actions check the sender’s credential.
They can also send you email attachments which after installation will monitor your PC and through that they collect information.
Most common ways of sending emails is with embedded links pointing to your banks website. Do not use these URLs unless you are 100% sure about the email ID which has sent this to you. Go directly to the bank’s website and log in there instead of clicking on the embedded links.
Be aware of Fake website for online banking
Many fraudsters are even having fake websites that resembles to your bank’s website with the name, logo and details in it to capture victim’s information. Once you started logging in, it will ask you for information about your bank account.
After getting this information they will use your account from actual website of your bank. If you are logged in from the actual website of your bank then make sure that you are properly logged out and terminate the session by closing the browser. Try to avoid accessing your net banking from a cyber space or through a WI-FI connection. These are prone to attacks by hackers.
URL check
Please make sure that you are using the actual URL of your net banking before logging into your account. Check if it starts with https. You can save the bank’s actual URL of net banking to your favorite list for your use instead of doing a Google search.
Password
Most of these banks are asking to enter a combination of different alpha numeric digit. Even then we request you to make sure that your password does not have any easy to guess words like your name, DOB or mobile number.
To have a safer net banking, we suggest you to change your net banking password in every once a month and do not write it anywhere, just remember it.
PC user for net banking
Your PC is the first point of contact while banking online. To avoid fraudsters in collecting information from your PC, you need to keep your operating system, antivirus and browser up to date with latest security patches.
To prevent you, all banks are offering online banking facility with 128 bit secure socket layer encryption technology or SSL. SSL is a universally accepted standard for authentication and encryption.
This encryption will help you to protect your information when you exchange information from your PC to bank’s website. While logging into your net banking account you have to look for SSL connection which can be seen on the bottom right hand corner or left hand corner of your website.
To protect yourself from these fraudsters, you need to make sure that you mobile number, email ID are updated regularly with your bank’s database.
If any of these details are changed then call your banks help desk or visit your nearest branch to update it. After every login, you need to clear your browser history, cookies and caches to make sure that your credentials are not accidentally stored in your PC for fraudster’s use.
If in case, you are a victim of any fraudulent activities then step one is calling your bank to ensure that no further transaction takes place from your account and then report it to the nearest police station.