Think you can relax as you've never made an online purchase? Don’t sit back as yet. Most of us have never made a purchase online but there are several ways your credit card can be misused.

Here are two examples of the recent past that should make us sit up and be on guard. This credit card racket was uncovered in the tourist areas of Agra and Jaipur.

In this case a credit card was misused when a foreign tourist gave it to a hotel waiter or an employee to pay his bills. After swiping at the machine given by the bank at the hotel counter, the waiter swiped it again in the skimmer machine, given by the shopkeeper. Racketeers regularly keep in touch with such waiters and collect the lipstick-size skimmers.

Recently another racket of misuse of credit card came to light in Thane near Mumbai. A sales clerk of the Globus store would pass on copies of the charge slip to his accomplices and they would then purchase airline tickets with the help of that information. ICICI Bank officials got the wind of it and sent out an alert.

These are only few incidents of scams being discovered. But there are surely many of  which are undiscovered or still cooking in crooked minds.