Have you ever fallen prey to a banking scam? It can happen to the best of us – but even if you’re hyper-vigilant about your personal banking practices, bad actors can still gain access to your account if they try hard enough.
That’s why you need to take extra steps to protect your bank account from fraud. There’s a good chance you’re already putting in work trying to beat the financial betting markets, and/or looking for sound investments to make. It only takes a fraction of that time to plug the potential leaks in your banking game; here are five concrete things you can do today to keep your money from leaving via the back door.
Create Online Accounts at Your Bank(s)
This may seem counterintuitive, but if you’re one of the few people who doesn’t bank online, you’re putting yourself in danger. Identity thieves can take advantage of you by creating accounts in your likeness; beat them to the punch by signing up for online access with all your financial providers.
Of course, once you have your online accounts in place, you should take the usual security measures you would while surfing the Web. But be even more cautious; devote a web browser (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, what have you) for banking only, then dump your cache and close your browser after every visit.
Change Your Password(s)
You’re already banking online? Fantastic – now go change your password. This might be the quickest and most effective way of securing your bank account; use the auto-generated “strong” encryption key they give you, or come up with a password of your own.
Make it a good one, though. Instead of some string of easily cracked characters like 69Demon#420, try using a complete phrase or sentence that you won’t have any trouble remembering. Do this for your online bank accounts, then do it for all the devices you use. Add multi-factor authentication at your discretion; there are pluses and minuses to enabling MFA/2FA for your online access.
Use “HTTPS” Web Pages
Anytime you’re doing anything sensitive on the Web, you should ideally be surfing a website with “https://” at the start of the URL, and not just “http://” when you look at your browser bar. That extra letter means the site you’re visiting has been secured using an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate, which encrypts the link between their web server and your browser.
Technically, today’s sites – including major financial institutions – use something called TLS (Transport Layer Security) instead of old-school SSL, but it’s all good; even if you don’t see those five magic letters at the start of the URL in question, you should be fine as long as you see that “padlock” icon in your browser bar.
Update Your Devices
Maybe you’ve got your smartphone set for automatic updates; maybe not. If not, update your phone manually so that it has the newest version of your operating system, complete with all the latest security patches.
Once you’ve done that, do the same for any tablets and computers you might do business on. We’re in this wonderful age where you don’t have to worry about computer viruses so much, but fraud and identity theft are still happening – so turn off your devices when you’re not using them. All the way off, not just asleep.
Learn the Scams
This will naturally take a bit longer than just tweaking a few settings, but the best way you can protect yourself from bad actors is to learn what they’re doing. Take it topic by topic; a few minutes reading about crypto rug pulls, for example, can save you thousands of dollars down the road. Digital Wager Wire has a treasure trove of articles like this, so keep reading, keep learning, and don’t let the bad guys win.
