Shopping online this holiday season? Use these tips to keep your money safe.

If you’re spending some of your hard-earned money online, make sure you know where it’s going. It’s pretty easy for scammers to put up a fake website that looks a lot like a real one. A scam website may show up in your search results, or scammers may send you a phishing email that looks like it came from a company you trust, but actually takes you to a rip-off site.

• Instead of clicking on a link, say in an email, type in the store’s URL yourself, so you know where you’re headed.
• Only pay on sites with URLs that starts with https. That ‘s’ means your transaction is encrypted…but scammers know how to encrypt, too. So don’t believe that a site is the real deal just because the site uses encryption.
• Pay by credit card. It gives you way more protections if something goes wrong.

Source: consumer.ftc.gov