An online credit card transaction is actually many times more secure than a physical or Point-of-Sale credit card transaction. The reason is that when you give your credit to a person, a store clerk or waiter, for instance, you expose yourself to the possibility that the person could copy the numbers and even your signature directly from the card. There are even devices that can copy the information from the magnetic strip. In contrast, during an online internet transaction, your credit card information is never seen by a person and your physical card cannot be compromised. A secure connection transmits your transaction via a 128-bit secure encrypted communication that is processed directly by the credit card merchant processing gateway. This level of secure encryption is virtually impossible to decrypt by anyone other than the intended authorized credit card payment company.