I guess that if you have been online for a few weeks or more you will have come across a company called PayPal. Paypal allows you to send and receive payments, not only for goods you have bought off eBay ( eBay owns PayPal), but you are able to use PayPal on a growing number of other sites around the internet.

And other recent months some brick and mortar shops and business allow people to pay with PayPal.

One of the big worries people have when buying online is the fact that they have to give over their personal information, and credit card details.

A useful tip for people out there, when you are buying or shopping online there are several pointers to look out for to keep you safer.

1) when you visit a site and go to pay look at the address you should see that the http bit has changed to https to added s means that it is on a secure server.

2) Often down at the right bottom of your browser you will see a padlock and as long as this is shut or closed then again it is on a secure server.

3) Some Anti-Virus software turns where you see the address either green or red as well. If it is green then it should be safe, and if it is red take care. Now you will notice that I say only take care and not to not shop. This is because the software could be out of date, or people have not said that it is safe (a lot of anti-virus software relies on their “public” to tell them a site is safe or not.

Now back to the main reason for this article, you will often hear people say…OK we do not have to give out credit or debit card details when we are using PayPal but all that is protecting us between the bad guys and girls is an email address and password. – PayPal do have other things as well in place to safe guard us.

For this reason PayPal along with Verisign have bought out the PayPal Security Key. This security key come in two forms.

1) It comes as a small fob (You do have to pay a few pounds or dollars for the fob)

2) You can use your mobile or cell phone and the only cost is the cost of sending a message.

You can sign up for this extra bit of security at the paypal site. Once you have signed in you, you go along to my profile, and then down the left hand side you will see PayPal Verisign key, click on this link and follow the instructions.

If you already have a verisign key then you may be able to use this. And once you have a security key you can use it on eBay and other sites.

The key gives you a random six digit number and you add this to the end of your password. This number is good for thirty seconds and then changes.

So now you have email, password and a six digit number so you are loads safer.

When you first get your key you log into say paypal and register the code number on the back and it is then set to use. If you want to use same key on eBay you need to register the code number on eBay.

Each key has a unique code and each key gives out random six digit numbers every thirty seconds.

Does this key make your accounts un-hackable ? Sadly no, but it goes a long way to help you.

If you wish to use your mobile / cell phone then each time you want to log into PayPal or eBay you send a text and they send a six digit number back, again this is OK for thirty seconds.

Stay safe and happy buying and selling. 

By Andrew Milburn

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