Is Online Banking Safe?

While seated in the comfort of your bedroom or office, a few mouse-clicks on the laptop work wonder now-a-days. You can check your account balance, your account usage, transfer cash, or just pay for your utilities like electricity, telephone bills or insurance premiums without standing in the long queues, it’s all possible by netbanking or online banking.

Though online banking, or netbanking, is highly secure, because the funds and assets are protected through password authentication and encryption technologies, the customer must take every care to see that the accounts are safeguard. So, do what the technology expects of you. Remember these points.

Precautions

• Never give your netbanking password to anyone else.

• Create a secure alpha-numeric password comprising of alphabets, numbers and special characters. Don’t use your own name or other obvious names or numbers connected with you in creating your password. Change your password every few months.

• ‘Phishing’ can happen, but you can prevent that by checking that your netbanking site is authentic and not a look-alike site created by a phisher to dupe you. Check each letter to see that your URL is correct (eg; https://www.onlinesbi.com/ for Online SBI) and nothing else.

• Never click on any hyperlink to access bank sites. Always type the complete URL at the address bar on your browser.

• Watch out for phishing e-mails, where a malicious letter targeted at you asks for your account details and password. Ignore such e-mails and inform the bank about them. Remember, your bank will never ask for such details from you, they already have them.

• If anyone visits you saying they’re from the bank, or approaches you via telephone and asks for your account details, never reveal anything. Inform the bank, and request a meeting with a reliable person there, for if they actually need details.