Purchases and payments via Internet - acting in a secure way

How many times have been known to try a product on the Internet and not to buy because it was required a credit card? Very often we get stuck at that point, failing to complete a purchase online or booking a trip. Actually there are safer alternatives for direct comparison of credit card: use prepaid cards.

Some of the most famous ones are Vodafone CashCard, Postepay, Kalibra Charter, Charter Yahoo, Saddle Money, CartaSi Eura, Charter Ego Go, Carteque, etc. Payup Charter.

To activate a Postepay (of Poste Italiane) you need to pay once 5 euros and whenever you withdraw or deposit money. You can use it for e-commerce sites or enabled supermarkets, exploiting the Visa Electron circuit (some even Mastercard). For these kind of payments there is no added fee.

A spread method of payment on Ebay is PayPal. It 's a mechanism that transfers money from one person to another, without providing card number each time.

With PayPal, you can go shopping around the world so free and secure either by credit card (Visa, Visa Electron, MasterCard) or prepaid card (as Postepay, Vodafone Cash Card, Kalibra and others), without sharing financial information with those who received the payment. I read some step to get paypal enabled on http://www.paypal.com:

• Register and fill in the online form with your credit card or debit card.
  
• Your credit card or debit card is linked to your account. No more data given, when you want to make a payment.
  
• The only information you need to know to send a payment is the recipient's email address.
  
• When you click on the button Pay, PayPal charges amount directly to your credit card or prepaid - no need for more.
  

It seems all so beautiful but in reality the problem is not resolved to 100%. Personal data is supplied to a trusted third party that has the responsibility to keep secrets (if the attackers could violate the site, would have full access).

You should also pay attention to the phenomenon of phishing, because there are many emails that arrive indicating updates requesting paypal account information: pay attention especially, at the name of the URL you connect to.