Alliance aims to make online shopping secure

Alipay.com Co, the biggest online payment company in China, has set up an alliance with more than 30 e-commerce companies to fend off the rising risks of online fraud, the company said on Sept 17.

The alliance, which will add more members later, aims to provide online shoppers with safety information, push forward new standards for safe online shopping, and jointly prevent fraud.

Last year, 450,000 new phishing sites - which obtain and store users' private information by disguising themselves as normal websites - appeared in China, according to a report by safety services provider Kingsoft Co.

The number of these websites at the end of last year almost doubled what it was at the beginning, it said.

Tens of millions of Internet users' accounts, passwords and other private information were made public online last year after a number of websites' were attacked.

The financial losses incurred by the disclosure of users' private information can be reduced by more than 90 percent with new standards, technology, and products jointly pushed forward by alliance members, Alipay said.