This is one of the videos we produced with the Central Bank of Malta

in our budgeting series.

Let me introduce the ĠEMMA family.  I am Tony.  I am Maria’s husband.  I work as a manager in a large business in the services industry.  My wife, Maria is 40 years old and works in her father’s family business.  We have two kids:  Matthias, our son who is 11 years old, and is now in secondary school, and Angele, our daughter who is 17 years old and is finishing upper secondary school this scholastic year.

I am angry today.  Tony just realised that he was defrauded when purchasing some electronic stuff.  I know that buying online you can find a lot of attractive deals.  I buy a lot of stuff online myself.  I, however, use a separate card for online shopping.  I tend to keep my e-purchases below €150.  That is my maximum risk exposure; that’s the limit of the separate card I use for shopping online.

Tony takes no such precautions. He uses his normal card, with the full credit limit for anything he purchases online.  I have been insisting with him to get a separate card.  Only yesterday he was telling me scams were all hype and that he was aware of the signs and knew what he was doing!

He was scammed €600! He realised because he got an alert from his bank saying that a transaction of €600 was carried out by his card.  He wouldn’t tell me at first!  Now he admits he was wrong.

Take my advice.  If you are online shopping trigger-happy do not use your normal card – get a separate one with a lower limit to minimise your exposure as much as possible.  Go through this ĠEMMA video. I suggest you go through the ĠEMMA Little Black Book series on Scams and Fraud.

Let us know your thoughts.  We look forward to hearing from you.  We at ĠEMMA encourage you to share this link or the video or the calculator or all of them with your friends or publicly on Facebook. Visit the ĠEMMA Facebook page and give us a like!