News & Resources

As the holidays approach and online shopping is a natural tendency, you need to ensure that your personal information isn’t being poached by scammers who could take your information and make fraudulent purchases.  Our Director of IT, Mike Bisso, compiled the top 10 tips for holiday shopping this season.

Here are a few tips while shopping this holiday season:

1. Never use a debit card that is linked to your cash to make purchases.  Always use a credit card or a credit card service to make purchases like PayPal and Venmo.
2. Take advantage of using store credit cards to make purchases at their stores such as Amazon, Macy’s, Home Depot etc.
3. Always, always, always use multi-factor authentication when possible with your banking and financial websites, social media, email etc.  Make them prove it’s you.
4. Turn on alerts especially on your banking and financial websites for transactions.
5. When shopping online at not-so-mainstream stores be leery and look for clues such as a phone number, address etc. so you can get in touch with them if there is an issue.  If an online website only offers an email address for contact, you should consider skipping the purchase.
6. Never, ever, ever make an online purchase on Free, Public, Open Access Wi-Fi.
7. Ship and track packages to a secure location!  Package thefts increase substantially around the holidays.
8. Monitor your bank and credit card statements.
9. Create secure passwords for all accounts and NEVER share passwords.
10. Be careful before you click on promotional email links…they may not take you where the link says you are going!

Edelstein offers IT Consulting Services and can help your business with Security Awareness and IT Security.