Many of us shop on the internet but do we always make sure that it is a secure site? Recently my sister had her credit card information stolen because she was not on a secure site. Within a matter of one day, six charges were made on her card and more were pending by the time she closed the account on the next business day.

Any time you are on a website where you are expected to provide secure information – - credit card information, account numbers or passwords, or anything else that someone could use to take your identity – - you should ALWAYS make sure you are on a secure website. To protect yourself, look for the following items when shopping online:

1- A SECURE CONNECTION – Normal web pages start with “http” however, over a secure connection, a website will begin with “https”. Note the “s” at the end.

2- A “LOCK” ICON- It is a standard practice for all web browsers to have a lock icon displayed when you are on a secure connection. I use Internet Explorer so my icon shows up in the far right of the web address bar. If you click on this icon it will display the details of the security of the site. If you are dealing with a merchant that you are not familiar with, you should click on this icon to view the site security because some fraudulent sites may try to imitate the icon. If you log into a PayPal account you can see that it says it is “identified by VeriSign.”

3- VERIFICATION SEAL – Online merchants want their customers to feel safe shopping with them so many will display highly visible but difficult to duplicate verification icons that will display details about the site’s security. With the PayPal example, an icon that says “VeriSign Identity Protection” is displayed.

If you don’t see any or all of these items, pick up the phone and call the merchant before risking your account and private information.

I always think it is important to teach my children the value of a dollar and we had an interesting lesson this past weekend. It all started when my husband and my young son started looking at Star Wars items on the internet. That led to them going on Ebay and my son deciding that he simply HAD TO HAVE the custom painted Star Wars Lego mini-figure. There was a little over an hour left in the auction and the current bid was at $12.50 with free shipping. The next thing I know, my son was dumping the money out of his piggy bank and was ready to hand it over to somebody… Anybody so that he could get the Lego. Clearly he did not understand Ebay.

I had to explain the entire auctioning process, the payment through Paypal, and the shipping concepts to him. Within this I asked him how much the figure was worth to him and then I made clear that he might not win the auction. I did not agree with how much he wanted to spend but since he was using his allowance, I agreed to help him. I think one of the biggest mistakes people can make on Ebay is that they get caught up in the auctioning process so I wanted to teach him about not spending more than he thought the figure was worth. To do this, I waited until the last 30 seconds to enter in his maximum bid. As it turns out, he didn’t win it but he already had another one in his sights and using a similar process of bidding at the last minute, he won without paying more than he (or we) wanted to spend.

Although I still think my son spent more on the Lego than I personally thought it was worth, he is very happy and is looking forward to it showing up in the mail this week. Meanwhile, it did turn out to be a good opportunity for us to explain the process to him and to show him a good way to weigh the value of the item against the money in his piggy bank.

And for now, both he and his father are BANNED from Ebay!