One of the big questions people ask about the internet (including online bingo) is …”is it safe?”
Well, we’ve all heard the other stories about next door’s hairdresser’s brother’s girlfriend’s second cousin who put their bank card details in one website then found that their account had been completely wiped out by someone on the other side of the world. But is this actually true and can it happen? Well the simple answer is yes….. and no. If you’re not careful and don’t follow some basic simple rules, then yes, you can lose your money the same as you would in real life if you left your purse open on a cafe table and went next door to have a look around. Make things simple for thieves and they will take advantage but with a little common sense then you should have no problems at all.
Obviously, someone will say that the weak point would be your password, and they would be right. Please don’t use easily guessed passwords for anything that you don’t want anybody else to get access to, this applies to whatever you’re doing on the Internet. Far too many people easily guessed passwords such as pet names, maiden names, dates of birth and it’s not unknown for people to actually use 123456 or password as the password! Any information on the Internet is only as secure as the password you have used, get into the habit of using a mixture of capital letters and small, and also numbers. For example, instead of spike2025 how about using S2p0i1k0E? It might look complicated but can you see that all I’ve done is overlapped the name and date and put a capital on each end. Just as easy to remember when you have typed it a few times but a lot harder for someone else to guess. Other people use letters and numbers that remind them of things. For example, they might have three children, Sarah, John and Peter, who were born in 91, 94 and 96. They might make a password like S9r1hJ9h4nP9t6r, complete gibberish right? Well, maybe not, simply a list of the children’s names with the vowels removed and the years of their birth date inserted between alternate letters, with the first letter of each name as a capital. Again very difficult for somebody else to guess but surprisingly easy for the password holder to remember.
The other thing people worry about is hackers, to be honest the majority of people will never come in contact with a hacker but there are steps you should be taking just to ensure your computer stays safe. Make sure you have an anti-virus installed on your pc, there are some excellent free ones available so it doesn’t have to cost anything, and also anti-spyware software, this picks up anything that has been saved on your pc for less than honest purposes, again free versions are available. The most important thing with both programs is to make sure they are updated regularly, this is usually done automatically. I won’t go into further details as there are a lot of sites who give fantastic information already such as the BBC’s WebWise site
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