Sharing credit card info securely

kfc wroteWhat are the precautions i should take?

Thanks!!!

If you want to add a layer of security, you can use a text encryption software, both on your side and the receiver side.
Install the software then encrypt the message send it over email then the receiver can decrypt the message using the software and use the info.
Also, make sure your email is HTTPS obviously.

@kfc: By default, your email will transition in clear text over the network, meaning that everyone, from your email provider, your ISP, a bunch of network corporations throughout the world, your recipient's ISP and your recipient email provider will be able to read its content.

You should encrypt your email so that only you and your recipient are able to read it. I won't detail how to do it because there are thousands of ways and I don't know which one will work best for you. Do your own googling and do some tests first. Start by searching for encryption in the documentation of the email client you use. If you have specific questions, use this topic to ask for help.

Then you ask them to get it. Think of encryption for an email as an enveloppe for your regular paper mail. If you don't put your letter in an enveloppe, the mailman is going to read it. If your recipient doesn't know how to open enveloppe, how can you send them a private letter?

Encryption can be a pain in the ass, and unfortunately, it's not activated by default (even though it should). Hopefully one day it will be the case, but keep in mind that it's not an easy task to implement.

In my opinion, if your recipient isn't getting a encryption software (and doing it properly), stay away from emails. How about sending these information via regular mail? At least with this, if someone opens your envelope (however unlikely), you'd know instantly and you'll have the time to react.

I've never been in this situation.
You obviously want the whole communication from one endpoint to the other to be encrypted using HTTPS, otherwise someone, somewhere might capture it and use it to their benefit. In practice, I think it is not very likely. Even if the traffic is passed in cleartext, it does not mean that it will be capture by someone with bad intents. But since we're talking about credit cards it's better not to take any risks, if possible.
Taking in consideration what rahmu said, if you can't guarantee that your email will be transferred over encrypted channels for the whole trip, then maybe you can use PGP encryption to encrypt it, and have your recipients decrypt it manually using PGP? I guess encrypting the content itself, instead or relying on the transport is one solution to guarantee that it will be safely transferred.
Another "trick" I've used - but I can't tell how safe it is - is to break down the information of your credit card and transfer it through different paths, for example, send half of it through email, and the other half through SMS/phone. If someone gets hold of half of the information, they can't use your credit card, and it's highly unlikely that someone would capture both phone and internet traffic.

Another easy, efficient and free way to encrypt/decrypt files is AxCrypt:

http://www.axantum.com/AxCrypt/

Do you have a phone number to call these people on? You can take an image of your CC, encrypt it using the software above, send it, and then give them the password to decrypt it by phone.

If you don't have a phone number to call (nor a physical address which you know exists), then you should be asking yourself if these people are legit before wanting to send your CC info.

Here's a dumb idea: Write the data to a textfile, Zip the text file with a password(right click, zip, set password) send it to the recipient, tell the recipient the password is your father's name(or whatever)

There ya go, encrypted message. Can it be broken? probably, but I do not think people randomly try to break zip files without knowing what they contain... And at the very least, it is better than sending the message just plain.

user wroteHere's a dumb idea

No offense, but it kinda is. It's an extremely weak encryption for a pretty sensitive information. If it were me, I wouldn't do that.

Also, a small paren that kinda feels important here: Your emails do not transit over HTTP(S). You may use a web client to read your inbox, (and you want to connect to it through https), but that won't give you any sort of security for your email transit. It will just encrypt the communication between your email client and your browser. That's it.

More info:

• SMTP
• IMAP
• POP

Seriously, fuck emails...

i don't know why everyone is conscious about security and surveillance conspiracies around here, when everyone here is just a regular person, i see lots of posts like that and find it kinda funny as if there are people lurking every person's emails around the world looking for such info.

anyway if your worried that much about someone stealing your credit card info, just send the number over email and the cvv over whatsapp or line or whatever, and you are good to go.

You can use one of the following ways (in order of personal preference):

• Download Pidgin and initiate an OTR session.
• Let your recipient set up a GPG keypair and encrypt the CC information using their public key.
• Use CyptoCat

For each of these methods, you should be aware of their individual limitations before trusting them fully.

Old school telephone way! Still the safest : )