Online fraud is a massive problem. It can be very difficult for us to ensure that our systems are kept completely malware free, or that our personal details will not be found by fraudsters somewhere online. These are some of the main ways in which fraudsters are able to gain the details necessary to break into their victim’s bank accounts.
There is one way to really limit any potential losses in the event that cyber-criminals do get access to a bank account, which is to limit the amount of money in that account. By making sure that only one bank account is internet accessible, we can limit the number of accounts that the fraudsters could ever hope to break into using the internet. In addition to this, the card that we use for online shopping should only be the card connected to this account, and not one connected to our other offline accounts.
In addition to this, by only ever keeping a minimal amount of funds on that particular account, any successful hacker will only have access to the amount of money that has been placed in it. By keeping most funds in an offline account, unconnected to the internet, we can ensure that the majority of our savings cannot be accessed by online fraudsters. In order to ensure that our online account will still have enough funds for us to use online, a regular payment to the online account from one of our offline accounts should be set up. This should be enough that we need for our regular online habits.
The difficulty in preventing cyber-fraud means that pragmatic solutions to this issue are needed. Prevention is great when it works, but it cannot work all the time. For this reason, in addition to prevention, it is vital for us to ensure that mitigation is also a part of our fraud prevention strategy. By using the method presented here, we can really limit the damage that can be done to use by cyber-fraudsters.