Internet safety is crucial any time you hit the web, but your guard should be sky-high whenever you borrow loans online.
Online loans rely on an exchange of information from the very first application, so you’ll be sending confidential data before you know you even qualify. Do so without knowing security best practices, and you could inadvertently expose yourself to fraud and other cybercrime. Follow these tips to borrow online loans with greater peace of mind.
1. Investigate Your Lender’s Privacy Policy Carefully
Cybersecurity should be a mutual goal shared by lenders and their borrowers. Lenders that value their borrowers’ online security will have industry-standard privacy policy. This policy will make it clear how they intended to collect and share your information.
How can read this policy? If you visit MoneyKey to research online loans, you can find this financial institution’s privacy policy as a link at the bottom of every page. The lending specialists at MoneyKey are not unusual—most online financial institutions set up their websites in the same way, so you can usually find this link by scrolling down.
2. Apply for and Maintain Online Loans Over a Secured Network
The latest tech means you apply for loans over the phone wherever you get Wi-Fi. This is incredibly convenient when financial disaster strikes out of the blue, as you can hop on your phone to get a loan online as soon as you need it.
Just be careful of how you apply for loans over the phone. Free or public Wi-Fi offered at the airport or café increases your risk of exposure, regardless of how air-tight your lender’s privacy policy may be. Fraudsters can easily hijack unprotected networks to eavesdrop on your activity, watching you input financial information and login credentials.
Wait until you can get on your secured home network for anything that requires sharing personal information.
3. Use a Long Password
Last year, brute force attacks increased by 671%. This cybercrime method involves a fraudster using AI to guess your password until it cracks your credentials.
Using a short password consisting of popular words or important dates make it easier for these cyphers to unlock your password. A password that’s 12 characters long containing at least one uppercase letter, on the other hand, would take 2,000 years for a computer to guess your password correctly.
4. Read Your Emails Carefully
When you borrow online loans, your financial institution will often use email to contact you. However, they’ll never ask you to do the following things:
- Respond in-email with personal information
- Send payments via money transfers or gift cards
- Open an attachment
- Follow a suspicious link you weren’t expecting
If you receive an email that makes any of these requests, there’s a good chance you’re the target of a phishing scam. Don’t click any attachments or links. Instead, report this suspecting scam to the Federal Trade Commission.
5. Use an Anti-Virus Program
Let’s face it —despite your best intentions, you can still wind up on a shady website. A comprehensive anti-virus program acts as a safety net for when you get into these sticky situations. It runs constantly in the background of your applications to run scans on every site, email, and attachment that you encounter and prevent malware from infecting your computer.
Borrowing Online Loans is Safe When You Protect Your Data
Horror stories of fraud can make you leery of online banking, but there’s no need to avoid this financial convenience. Boosting your digital security literacy can help you borrow money online safely. You’ve already started with these tips — keep educating yourself to maintain safe as cybersecurity and threats evolve.