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Today we will look at security for online shopping. More and more people are concerned about giving out credit card and other personal information over the internet. It is estimated that about ten million people a year become victims of Identity Theft.

So how can you protect your information over the internet? One of the best ways I have found so far to protect yourself is through the use of PayPal.com.

For those of you that don't know what PayPal is, it is a website that you can join for free and after you join you can put money into your PayPal account to use when shopping online.

Most online merchants today use PayPal as the preferred method of transacting business. The way to get started using PayPal is to sign up for a free account and then transfer money to your paypal account to use for online shopping.

If you are just going to shop online a paypal account is free. If you are also going to sell things online as an example on ebay then you can make your free PayPal account a Premier Business account. When you do this your account is still free to use to make purchases online but when you sell something and money is transferred to your account from the buyer then a small fee is charged.

You can use PayPal online anywhere you see the PayPal logo. But what makes PayPal so secure to use? PayPal has come out with a technology called the "PayPal Plug-in" This is a browser toolbar that works with both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla FireFox.

To get this toolbar log into your PayPal account and click on the "PayPal Plug-in" link on the right side of the page. Follow the online instructions to setup the plug-in and when it is complete you will see a "P" with a little downward arrow in your browsers toolbar section. Now the plug-in is ready to use.

Now the plug-in does two main things. First, when ever you go shopping on a site and you go to the check out page of that site when you come to the page to fill in your billing and shipping information the plug-in will detect these text fields and the plug-in will drop down and give you the option to use the plug-in to auto-fill in your billing and shipping information that you set up when you opened your PayPal account
But here is where the really secure part of the plug-in comes in. When you get to the page to enter your credit card information the plug-in will again drop down and give you the option of creating a virtual MasterCard credit card.

By using the plug-in to create a virtual MasterCard you don't have to enter you Bank credit card or debit card. The plug-in can create two types of cards. A single use card to use if you are only going to buy from this merchant this one time. Or a multi use card if you are going to buy from this merchant on an on going basis. After the plug-in creates the virtual card it will automatically fill in the credit card fields on the webpage.

You can use either type of card you like and you can save your sales receipts in your PayPal account. The one thing that I like best about using the plug-in is that after you have made your transactions with a seller you can go into your PayPal account and click on your PayPal plug-in link and view all your virtual cards and deactivate and delete any card that you want to so that you know that that particular virtual card can never be used again whether it be a single use or multi use card.
And since the plug-in generates a virtual MasterCard you can use the PayPal Plug-in even on online merchants that don't accept PayPal as a method of payment.

Learn more about this author, Chuck Baker.
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