Don’t use your credit card on Buy.com!

Turns out if you use your credit card on Buy.com or a bunch of other sites and don’t read the “pop-up” $10 off message and/or put a bogus email in there, you will be charged a monthly fee because buy.com will give you CC# to a 3rd party coupon site. Full Story

Solution?

If a page offers it (and buy.com does) use PayPal. If a site doesn’t, use PayPal with it linked credit card feature. You can get a temp visa number linked to any read credit card that is only available for so much credit (you name to amount) and the temp account is only good for so long then de-activates.

Paypal also keeps your Credit Card info one step away from the site so the site has nothing valuable to be hacked.

For more security, check out getting a security key from Palpal (only $5, worth it), or get a SecureID VIP from Verisign. The credit card version is $40 and fits in a wallet, the software can go on a number of phones (iPhones, Nokia smartphones and a few Motorola). They all use a syncronizing server number that is good for about 30secs, so even if someone is packet sniffing or doing a “man in the middle” attack on a Paypal session, the number will expire before they can do anything with the information.

BTW all security keys (software and hardware) will also work on Ebay.