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  • Resolved Lynne777

    (@lynne777)


    Hello! πŸ™‚ Just wondering if anyone can answer a question about the Contact Form plugins (in general) for WordPress.

    With contact forms, when they are sent, are they sent via encryption? Just wondering how that works, in case someone sent credit card details for instance?

    Wondering how secure the information would be?

    Many thanks πŸ™‚

    Lynne

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  • Most are not sent encrypted. There might be some out there, but I haven’t seen any yet.

    The main thing that you’ve said that concerns me is when you’ve mentioned contact forms and credit cards in the same sentence. Please do not ever do send credit card information via email in any way, even if it is “encrypted”. Yes I mean that to be bold. It’s very important.

    There’s a few reasons for this. Firstly, email is inherantly insecure. Emails pass through many different servers on their way to their destination, and any of those servers can sniff the contents for details such as credit card details. It’s not common, but it does happen. The other thing to consider is that harvesting credit card details via email is normally against the terms of service of every merchant account that I’ve seen, so if your bank ever finds out that you (or even suspects you of) doing this they will close your merchant account immediatly. I had a client a few years back that had this happen so I know it’s a very real possibility.

    If you need to collect credit cards, get a real online merchant account and use that. Most have a page that you can direct to where they take care of the payment, some have an API that you can link into with some programming knowledge, and some have other options as well. If you’re not doing big volumns, PayPal is one of the easiest ways to go, and these days probably one of the mroe well known ones.

    Thread Starter Lynne777

    (@lynne777)

    Thank you! I really appreciate the feedback and it is as I had suspected. I appreciate the clarification as I have heard of someone doing this and I was concerned about the encryption aspect, especially when I heard some were sending him credit card details via the form!

    Much appreciated! Thank you πŸ™‚

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