When credit cards first became a reality, the business world heaved a sigh of relief. From that time onwards, people were able to pay for stuff on cash with credit card without having to make upfront cash payments, but they have to pay for the items later.

As convenient as credit cards are, the risks associated with it are equally overwhelming. The worst of such is the problem of credit card debt that most often destroys a lot of people.

As a result of this, most affected people find it difficult to move ahead in life.

In case you don’t know, your credit card represents the credit account you hold with the credit card company. Every single payment you make with a credit is nothing but a borrowing, and allowing this to accumulate is what brings about credit card debt.

Your total credit card debt is the total amount you owe the credit card supplier. Every month, your credit card company will issue you a statement showing you the amount you owe and which must be redeemed before a certain date.

It is the usual custom to give people the chance to pay off their credit card debt in bits, but failure on your part to fulfill this obligation will incur you late fee and interest charges.

There is one potential danger you should try to avoid, and it is not honoring your credit card payment or doing so by partial payments, this is the cause of huge interest rate accumulated by many people.

Therefore, anyone who wants to steer clear of the nasty circle of credit card debt must find a way to control the way they spend.

Image courtesy: mathowie

The seed for this post was an email I received yesterday. I’m a verified PayPal user using a Gmail address for the login user email address in PayPal.com. I haven’t made any transaction through PayPal within last 3 or 4 months. But I received an email to my admin email address of this website (admin@best-internet-guide.com if you are willing to contact me and don’t know my email address :-)), informing me that I have made a payment to a person having a PayPal login email id digishopbay123@macintosh.com and asking to click a link to dispute the transaction. The email I received is given below.

From: service@intl.paypal.com [mailto:service@intl.paypal.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 4:50 PM
To: undisclosed-recipients:
Subject: Dispute Transaction

Dear PayPal Member,

This email confirms that you have sent an eBay payment of $47.75 USD to 

digishopbay123@macintosh.com for an eBay item. 

———————————–

Payment Details

———————————–

Amount: $38.75 USD

Transaction ID: KSUGS10992LAKLLX0909

Subject: Pioneer Cd Player 138

Note:

If you haven’t authorized this charge ,click the link below to dispute transaction 

and get full refund

Dispute transaction (Encrypted Link )

*SSL connection:

PayPal automatically encrypts your confidential information

in transit from your computer to ours using the Secure 

Sockets Layer protocol (SSL) with an encryption key length 

of 128-bits (the highest level commercially available)

———————————–

Item Information

———————————–

eBay User ID: multimediacdplr

—————————————————————-

Michael Rotenberg’s UNCONFIRMED Address

—————————————————————-

Michael Rotenberg

879 Markenson  St. 

76649 Iredell, TX

United States

Important Note: Michael Rotenberg has provided an Unconfirmed Address. If 

you are planning on shipping items to Michael Rotenberg, please check the 

Transaction Details page of this payment to find out whether you will 

be covered by the PayPal Seller Protection Policy. 

—————————————————————-

This payment was sent using your bank account. 

By using your bank account to send money, you just:

- Paid easily and securely

- Sent money faster than writing and mailing paper checks

- Paid instantly — your purchase won’t show up on bills at the end of 

the month. 

Thanks for using your bank account!

—————————————————————-

Thank you for using PayPal!

The PayPal Team

PayPal Email ID PP980

I was confused by hearing that I have made a payment which actually I didn’t. 

I was little curious and felt the scent of another probable scam. 

Therefore I thought to click that link and explore about this. 

The link which was asked to be clicked was having the URL given below.

http://mail.moraga.ca.us/users/manager/www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr.php?

cmd=_flow&SESSION=60-SQEaP_wWvhPmjul-DllC5OkU8dzThCY4mF5LzvZxGdMv

LhBSjCflCmUW&dispatch=5885d80a13c0db1f02baca35d810c8ec1c019f6b4e949c

a66922b381ebbdcb08

It starts with http://mail.moraga.ca.us which is not http://www.paypal.com or a sub domain of paypal.com (Ex:http://dispute.paypal.com). My assumption was correct and I thought to explore further. When I clicked that link, I was taken to a webpage which I was stunned to see. It is added below.

It is identical to the real paypal.com home page except the URL. An average person will definitely click that link as he/she hasn’t made that transaction and visit this webpage. And he/she won’t notice that even though the home page is identical but the URL is different. Actually most of us don’t look at the URL of a familiar website. As I mentioned above, my real PayPal email (xxxxx@gmail.com, I will send you my real PayPal email address if you like to make a donation for me ), is not the same one which I received this email. Next part is the most interesting.

I wanted to check the mistakes these dangerous cheaters have done. Therefore I opened the real paypal.com webpage also. First I hit the submit button without entering the user email id or the password. A popup message box appeared as shown below.

Then I checked the same scenario with the real paypal.com website. It took me to another page and showed an error message which was embedded in the webpage (not a message box). The error message shown is given below.

You must enter both your email address and password. Please try again.

Then I hit the submit button only with the user email id. The fake PayPal website showed another error message box as shown below.

When I did that with real paypal.com, it gave the same error message mentioned above. If you noticed, you will find the title of the fake error message boxes have a URL http://mail.moraga.ca.us not something like http://dispute.paypal.com.

Then I added the email address a@a.com and password as 11111, which both are fakes. Surprisingly I was successfully verified and taken into another webpage which asks my credit card details to verify my payment and refund. That page is shown below.

If you don’t provide your real credentials to the real paypal.com, you will not be allowed to proceed further. My assumption was becoming a reality. I didn’t add my credit card details. Then I logged in to the real paypal.com with my real credentials and checked whether there are any pending dispute transactions. I couldn’t find any and I also checked all my transactions. But I couldn’t find any transaction related to that email address. I thought to do some research on this. But it didn’t take a long time as I found some information from the paypal.com site itself. They have mentioned about phishing emails and asked to report about those types of messages to an email address (spoof@paypal.com).

I forwarded the email received explaining everything as mentioned above. They replied me indicating that it is a phishing message. I have added the reply below.

—–Original Message—–
From: spoof@paypal.com [mailto:spoof@paypal.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 6:21 PM
To: Sampath Wijeratne
Subject: RE: Q510 - Thank you for your email to PayPal (KMM95898866V11853L0KM) :kf1

Thanks for taking an active role by reporting suspicious-looking emails.

The email you forwarded to us is a phishing email, and our security team

is working to disable it.

————————-

What is a phishing email?

————————-

Phishing emails attempt to steal your identity and will often ask you to

reveal your password or other personal or financial information. PayPal

will never ask for your password over the phone or in an email and will

always address you by your first and last name.

Take our Fight Phishing Challenge at

https://www.paypal.com/fightphishing to learn 5 things you should know

about phishing. You’ll also see what we’re doing to help fight fraud

every day.

————————-

You’ve made a difference.

————————-

Every email counts. By forwarding a suspicious-looking email to

spoof@paypal.com, you’ve helped keep yourself and others safe from

identity theft.

Thanks,

The PayPal Team

_______________________________________________________________________

This email is sent to you by the contracting entity to your User

Agreement, either PayPal Inc, PayPal Pte. Ltd or PayPal (Europe) S.à

r.l. & Cie, S.C.A. Société en Commandite par Actions, Registered Office:

5th Floor 22-24 Boulevard Royal L-2449, Luxembourg RCS Luxembourg B 118

349.

_______________________________________________________________________

I hope that everything is clear for you now. Millions of PayPal users might have been trapped into this when you are reading this post and they might have lost millions of Dollars. I thought that informing others by posting this post will at least save some of their money. If you don’t believe what I mentioned here, just visit that URL and enter a fake user email address and password. You will experience the same what I experienced. But NEVER add your credit card details. If you think that this will be interesting for your friends, click the topic of this post. Then you will be allowed to tell a friend about this by sending an email. I will come with another interesting topic like this with the next post.

Rank of a website directly shows how important the website is and the frequency of the people who access it. There are many websites dedicated to rank every website in the internet according to various ranking formulas and algorithms. Therefore the rank of a website definitely varies from a ranking organization to another. But there are mainly two organizations to find a reasonable rank value where most of the people around the globe trust. As I promised you in the earlier post, I will explain how to find the rank of your website or another website using these two organizations. It is very important to find the rank of another website when you plan to purchase a good or service (for SEO, to register in paid web directories and to publish press releases).

The first rank I recommend is Google. The Google’s ranking algorithms are so complex and changing time to time. It is the most respected in the Internet as far as I know. There are many websites who shows the Google page rank of a website by asking to enter the URL of the website. But we can’t be 100% sure about their accuracy. My advice is to download the freely available Google toolbar for your web browser (offered for Firefox and IE). After downloading and installing it, restart the web browser. You will find the Google toolbar attached to your web browser as follows.

Now you are ready to find the page rank of any website you prefer. All you have to do is, go to the website you like to find the page rank. After it is fully loaded look at the small horizontal box in the Google toolbar as follows.

If Google has started ranking for the website you accessed, the box will appear activated and if the website has a rank > 0, it will be displayed in green color. When you take your mouse over it, it will show the page rank as a fraction of 10 (Ex. 1/10, 2/10 to 10/10).

Oops! I forgot to tell you about the Google rank range. Google rank starts from zero and ends with 10. If the website has a rank 10, it is the best (I couldn’t find a website ranking 10 up to now.). If the above mentioned box in the Google toolbar is inactive, most probably the website is new. Otherwise it is not publicly listed. You have to e careful when you pay for these kinds of websites. My personal advice is to find a website which has a rank greater than or equal to 5, if you plan to pay for a good or service offered online.

The other most respected ranking organization is alexa.com. It is more informative than the Google toolbar. But the ranking algorithm and criteria is different from Google. The websites having higher ranks in Google also have higher ranks in alexa.com normally. Therefore any respected and trusted website will have similar rankings in Google and alexa.com. Those ranks will not be the same. But both will show higher ranks for trusted and famous websites. Alexa.com shows a graph of website traffic for any website which is among the top 100,000 websites. It also shows the number of visitors from each region/country. And there are many other statistics displayed. With alexa.com, you also have the facility to compare traffic of multiple websites up to 5. This is a very good feature provided there if you are in a situation where you have to make a choice from multiple numbers of websites. I used this technique to find my webhost as I had to make a decision to choose a web hosting company from multiple websites.

If the website you wanted to find the rank shows higher ranks in both Google and alexa.com, you can trust it. I advise you to find traffic details of it using alexa.com ranking as it will show you the recent progress or decline of traffic of that website. Always try to choose a website which has a steady traffic. It is better not to choose new websites for your payments.

Now you know how to find the rank of a website and sometimes you might find the page rank of this website :-). You won’t be able to find a higher rank as this is a new website. But I hope that you will trust me on the future information that I’m going to provide freely. In the next post, I will move back into SEO and I will explain you about the most common SEO abusing methods which will affect your website badly.

Online shopping has evolved into a major shopping medium all over the world. It is a convenient and time saving way of shopping if you know how to do it properly. Otherwise you’ll end up with a waste of your hardly earned money. Some people even buy cars through online shopping. But there are some important things to consider when shopping online. This article will let you know some important features that you should know when you shop online.

The most important thing is you must know your budget and what are the essential items that you have to buy. Many online shopping websites use various kinds of marketing strategies to promote relevant products that you are going to buy. For an example many websites display some related items to the item that you searched as “The shoppers who bought your item also bought these” or Buy one or more from these items and you will get a x% discount”. You must not buy them unless you have a requirement as this will reduce your money to buy your most needed items if you are sticking into a budget.

Next thing you must consider is what type of an item that you are planning to buy. If you are planning to buy consumer goods like milk, chocolate, butter, drugs, etc., you know what are the brands that you usually buy. Then it is easy to search those items on the web and you can check whether the prices are reasonable as you know their general price margins. But if you plan to buy items like apparel, jewelries, Electronics goods, fruits, vegetables etc., you must have a good understanding about them as in online shopping you just see pictures or animations. You can’t touch them or check whether they are in a good condition. My advice is that if you are desperate in buying these kinds of items from an online shopping mall, you must first read their item return policy and online shopping policy. If those policies are satisfying, you can consider about purchasing them online.

Another important thing is that the popularity and reliability of the website. This is very important as there are many scams in the internet (For more information, please read these articles Article1 and Article 2 ). You can find reviews on the website that you are going to purchase items. This is a must you should follow.

Next thing you should consider how they deliver your ordered items and how long it will take. Normally if you need them in a hurry, you will have to pay more. You must find out whether they follow a proper packaging and delivery strategy which guarantees that you received your ordered items safely on time and as it is.

In my personal view, it is better if you do normal shopping for the items like fruits, vegetables, and valuable items like jewelries. You can do online shopping for the items which can be kept for a long time and doesn’t require more attention when selecting. And never buy from a single website. Do a comparison and find the best website for your required items.

Online payment is not a new thing. But it is very important to understand how to do it safely as there are millions of incidents happened where hackers(Internet thieves - not everyone) steal your credit card information and use it for their purchases. If this happens to you, you will be in a big trouble wandering how to pay the credit card bill for the purchases that you didn’t make.

Many people are not aware about it and sometimes gets into trouble. The first thing you must do when you try to pay online, check the website URL in the address bar of your web browser. If it is starting with http://, then it is not secure to pay online. The website URL must start with https:// to ensure that your payments are secured. If it is not, don’t make any payments.But there have been some incidents where even this method is not secure and hackers have been able to get credit card information. So you should go with the best solution, which is paying through a payment gateway. The best way is using a service like Paypal where you can make online payment without exposing your credit card details. You can register there and give your credit card details to paypal which is a highly respected service and you don’t need to fear about your credit card details. I strongly suggest you to use a service like Paypal. Most of the goods and service providers accept Paypal payments. If you are an online businessman or not you can open a paypal business account easily and experience many facilities. Try the following link, if you wish to get a new Paypal account.