President of Bluestone Federal Credit Union shares some financial safety tips

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (Dakota News Now) - Jeff Jorgensen is the President of Bluestone Federal Credit Union and has some financial safety tips to share with the community.

For starters, when it comes to cash or credit/debit, Jorgensen has a recommendation:

“The best thing about using plastic is if you have something happen to your transaction that would affect your account, you get it back. You can just contact the financial institution or Visa, Mastercard or American Express — whoever you’re working with — and they will reimburse you for those expenses or losses if you incur any of them. So as long as you have prudent control of that card, you’re going to be okay, so that’s a wonderful thing. If you lose cash, there’s nobody you can call to pick it up again. It’s gone,” said Jorgensen.

For online shopping, he recommends double-checking the site you are making your purchase from and being responsible in keeping track of your account for charges.

“To be blunt, the scammers and the people who are criminals are smarter than me, they’re smarter than you, and they’re just ahead of the game. So really, you just have to try to make sure you don’t go to a spam or phishing site. Try to recognize, ‘Is this really Amazon? I better make sure.’ I will go to Amazon myself and make sure, but the other thing that is really important for people is to just simply be responsible for their transactions. Nowadays with phones, you can literally just log into your account literally a hundred times a day. I don’t recommend that, of course, but you can just simply look on your account and see what transactions are happening on your account,” said Jorgensen.

When it comes to whether or not mobile wallets are a safe way to make transactions, Jorgensen has some thoughts on that.

“I really like what mobile wallets allow you to do. They also secure your card information so even if you were able to break into this, you’re not going to see my card number, and all the transactions I conduct using my mobile phone are encrypted with different identification methods, so it even is more secure to use that than your physical card,” said Jorgensen.

For more information and tips to avoid fraud and identity theft, visit consumerfinance.gov/consumer-tools/fraud/.

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