Making purchases online can be an intimidating experience; especially the part of the transaction where you’re required to enter your checking account information or bank card number for the merchant to use. The mere thought of sending that type of sensitive information throughout cyberspace is the sole reason that millions of people have yet to discover the true purchasing power of the internet.

While there are millions of fly by night websites out there that do not necessarily take your personal information seriously, there are also just as many legitimate vendors that conduct hundreds or even thousands of transactions online every day through secure channels that even the best hackers can not begin to penetrate. This method of security is known as encryption and in recent years the technology has seriously flourished, but the downside is that it is often quite expensive to implement. That’s why huge mega-websites like Amazon.com are considered completely safe while the smaller mom and pop businesses are not; it all has to do with their security certificates and their ability to repel hackers.

Now, this does not mean that all online shopping websites out there are legitimate and with your best interests in mind, because programmers will often create what is called a “spoof” website to trick you into thinking that you’re shopping with one of the more trusted virtual locations. The tactic to lure you onto these copied webpages is normally completed by sending you an email that says it is from a trusted seller, but with a closer inspection it is easy to spot these from a mile away. The easiest method is to examine the actual email address (to the right of the business name in the “from” category) and any of the links contained within the document (by highlighting the link itself and looking at the address in the bottom left corner of the page). If the email claims to be from Amazon, for example, the email address will be something like xxx@ amazon.com and the link will read www .amazon.com (without the spaces in there). If the addresses or link reads anything else, no matter how similar (like www. sale.amazon.com), it is likely fake.