Never, ever, allow pre-authorized payments out of a bank account. At most, from a credit card. Use a throwaway credit card number if you have that available.
Never share your banking information other than credit card numbers with any vendor.
Whenever signing up to pre-authorized payments is optional, make sure it's easy to revoke before getting into it.
I only do such a thing for my cell plan, which is a monthly pre-paid thing. I can go in there and revoke it at any time. If you have it set on automatic, you get some benefits, like more gigabytes.
If post-dated cheques are an option, that's not a bad way to go. Young people should learn how to write checks. (I'm using both spellings cheque and check here on purpose.)
I pay condo management fees via post-dated cheques. I write them around half a year in advance or so. They cannot cash a cheque before the date written on it. You can ask for unused cheques back: they are physical tokens, using copies of which would be fraud.
Tip: if you're under forty, ask a baby boomer in your family for a run down on cheque writing and cashing.