Over three quarters of Australians engage in online transactions from both home and work computers but 73.6% do not read the security policy of the site they are purchasing products or services from and 33.7% do not know what to look for to ensure those sites are legitimate and secure.

I plead guilty, I am one of them. I usually click on the security policy, see all that text and click straight back out, who wants to read so much fine print?

If you’re like me there are some quick and easy ways to gage a better idea if a website is safe that doesn’t involve endless reading. According to Dynamic Business Magazine, safe websites have a green address bar in high security browsers such as Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox. Phew, I just checked my bank’s login page and at least they have this.

A padlock icon in the lower or upper right hand corners of the screen and https:// in the browser are also good indicators that a website is secure.

When I am shopping online, one thing I always do is check that the website I am purchasing something from has a contact phone number and address, however I have never actually called the phone number to check it is legitimate and I’m not alone. 50.6% of the survey respondents said they don’t check whether the website they are engaging in a transaction with has a legitimate phone number or mailing address, from now on I will definitely be checking this.

Do you know how to spot a fake website? The really obvious fakes I’m pretty sure I could tell but how do we really know? Dynamic Business Magazine says good indicators that a website is fraudulent are prominent misspellings and frequent grammatical errors. We should also be aware of what the order form is asking us for; do they want more personal details than necessary?

I am definitely going to pay attention to all these tips, the number of cyber criminals is only set to increase as we spend more and more time transacting online.