Online shopping has truly revolutionized the simple process of conventional shopping. The barter system has seen its fair share of upgrades in recent times, but the latest practice of shopping while sitting at the comfort of your couch is probably its most convenient and ingenious iteration. However, all that comfort and mind-boggling convenience come at a cost, and that exists in the form of cybercrime or online scams.
The relevant threat of online scams and identity theft is one of the biggest concerns when it comes to venturing out into the digital platform. The magnitude of insecurity and vulnerability that the digital ecosystem puts on an average Joe is often not worth the absurd level of convenience they offer. As such, there is still a generous portion of the population that maintains a firm skepticism of shopping online. And, the rest of the bunch, especially newbies end up falling prey to the bogus promises of mouth-watering offers and discounts.
There are, however, a handful of precautionary steps you can take to ensure you keep all those digital scams and spurious websites at bay and shop with optimal security and a convincing layer of digital fortification as well.
- Keep a sharp eye on the address bar
Sniffing out a fake/ unsafe website is not as complicated as programming some bunch of complex algorithms, as Hollywood would want you to believe. In the majority of the cases, you can tell if the website is safe to visit or not by simply looking at its address bar. The conventional websites on the internet will have two types of address bars-one with “Https” and the other bunch with “Http” prefix. For instance, in https://www.dfydaily.com/, the “S” in https represents the safety status of the website, which obviously means the website is safe and secure, and the data transfers in such websites are encrypted to ensure your personal information do not get exposed directly.
Websites with “Http” address bars, on the other hand, signifies the complete contradictory condition. While visiting such safe (https) websites do not guarantee a scam-free experience, it is of utmost importance that you refrain from venturing out into an obvious unsafe website with questionable security status.
- Inspect the domain name carefully
Often time people click to a website they think is genuine but end up browsing on a completely different and unsafe (obviously!) portal. For instance, Amazon, eBay, Target, etc. These are websites that you would normally just click on, blindfolded! That is primarily because they have a solid and genuine reputation for being an authentic and safe gateway. And that is specifically where the scammers have gone good at-utilizing the reputation and brand trust that such websites have developed over the years, and implement that to rip you off.
Hackers create websites, rather replicate websites with a reliable brand value to lure you into thinking you are visiting the authentic webpage. However, a user cannot create a 100% copycat webpage. Hence, there will be some subtle differences in their domain names. For instance, Amazon.com, Ebay.com, etc. It is important to analyze and sniff out such minute details before clicking on to any webpage.
- Investigate the age of the domain (website)
The age of the domain name refers to the timeline of the website (when it was created). Amazon.com, for instance, was created in 1994, which would mean by 2020, the e-commerce giant will be 26 years of age. The same is applicable for any type of reputed online shopping sites on the internet. However, the majority of fake websites will usually have an extremely short lifespan (years). Sometimes even in months or days, and this is primarily because the majority of scammers will create websites a month or day prior to some shopping-friendly seasons or holidays when people are most prone to click on to anything that promises them a good deal.
There are several online tools available on the internet that allow you to check several aspects of the website, such as its lifetime (age), who they are registered to, and where they are registered to.
Of course, there are some genuine websites that may have been coincidentally created around the same time; hence, they might not have a convincing life cycle to boast of. But, these genuine websites will always be in the news or any other form of a marketing platform to promote their venture, so make sure you do a quick background check as well.
- Watch out for poor user-interface and grammatical mistakes
Seem like an absurd idea to crisscross the grammatical errors in a shopping webpage, doesn’t it? Yet, that is one of the easiest ways to sniff out a bogus online shop portal. The use of excess punctuation and caps lock letters are one of the many hints of an inauthentic webpage, as those minute errors indicate the website probably went up quickly, as opposed to going through a thorough authentication procedure.
Poor user-interface is also one of the key aspects to consider when visiting any webpage. Shopping websites are generally designed to function and offer as much smooth and lag-less user-friendly experience as possible. So, a sloppy or poorly designed website with an unintuitive user interface that does not provide quick response can mean the website is not genuine.
