Diana the Valkyrie

Diana the Valkyrie's Guide to the Internet

A hard man is good to beat

Using your credit card on the internet

Before I started running this web site, I didn't really know very much about credit cards. All I knew was, you show it to the waiter, and that pays your restaurant bill. Or petrol (gasoline). Or clothes, whatever. But now I use it a lot on the internet. You probably do too.

It is, in fact, very safe to use your credit card on the internet. Of course, it isn't safe doing business with dishonest companies. That's true whether they're trading over the internet, by phone, or any other way. Could your credit card number be somehow "intercepted" or "hacked"? Very unlikely. If someone wants to steal credit card numbers, they'd go down the mall and look over a few shoulders as the credit cards were being run. Or root through restaurant dustbins for sales slips. If you give your credit card using a Secure Server, the chance of it being intercepted drops to practically nothing.

But there's a few useful tips I can give you.

  1. When you get your monthly credit card statement, check each item. If there's anything you don't recognise, ask your bank to find out what it is. If there's expenditures you're certain that you or a family member did not make, tell the bank that.
  2. If you join a web site, find out how to cancel before you join. And make sure you know whether the billing is one-off, or recurring. And write the cancellation instructions down (or print them out) together with your user-id and password. Also, if they have a surface mail address, write that down, or print it out. You'll need that if you no longer have access to the internet, and want to cancel.
  3. Don't rely on your computer being able to remember important things for you. Computers stop working, hard disks crash, and Internet Explorer sometimes forgets all your passwords. Unless you have it on *paper*, you can't be sure you have it.
  4. Before you send an email to someone, check that your email address works, and that you know what it is. If you send an email that just says "Please cancel", and you do it from an email address that is different from the one you gave when you signed up, they won't know who you are. They'll probably email you back; if your return email address doesn't work, then you might think you've cancelled, but there's no way they can know who to cancel.
  5. If you're on AOL, and you choose the option that stops you getting email messages from the internet, and then you write to someone, then they can't reply to you. Also, if you're using a normal ISP, and you set your email so that the reply address is wrong, any replies will go astray, and you'll wonder why everyone is so rude and never answers you.
  6. If you try to cancel a recurring billing by cancelling the credit card, chances are that won't work. For some reason, the banks helpfully re-open the card when they get another billing. And you will get more billings, because if you cancel a card, no-one tells the people billing you that the card is cancelled, so they go on billing. You can spend months closing and re-closing the same account.
  7. When you buy hardware over the internet, check a few different vendor sites. I've found that sometimes the same thing on one web site is 50% more expensive than on another. Many vendors give free carriage to orders over the web.
  8. When you buy books, CDs or videos on the internet, check the shipping/handling costs. These are sometimes quite large compared to the price of the goods, and you might shop around for a better deal on that.
  9. When you buy software over the internet, you'll download a file, then they'll send you a key to unlock it. Put this key somewhere very safe, you'll need it again if you change computers, or if you need to replace your hard disk.
  10. Internet email isn't reliable. You only have to make a small mistake, and the email won't get there. I've recently seen people write to valkyrie@valkyrie.com, to valkyrie@thevlakyrie.com, valkyrie@thevalkryie.com. In the first case, there is a computer somewhere called valkyrie.com, but it isn't me. In the second and third cases, the email goes heaven knows where. If you write to someone and they don't reply, you should consider the possibility that you made some small mistake addressing it.