How to find safe new Online Casinos
When gambling in a casino, we always play the odds. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. But at least we know that the wins and losses are due to our own conscious risks and hedged bets. But not all recreational gamblers live in proximity of a casino and not everyone can travel to one whenever they feel the urge to play. From this desire to gamble when no physical casinos are available, comes the large online business of online gambling.
Online casinos have been around for a while now, but more of them are coming online all the time. However, with so many choices, users do need to be careful with their choices. Simply choosing any online casino and trusting in its integrity is quite risky and staying safe online is immensely important in protecting our livelihoods.
If you were to just rely on a Google search, you would receive many online casino hits upon your query. That alone includes basically no vetting. When you gamble at online casinos, you want your risks to be playing the odds of the games you play, not that you have entered into a malicious, fraudulent hoax that would cost you serious headaches and a lot of money.
Online gambling is a multi-billion dollar industry with a lot of new arrivals harboring less than savory causes hoping to get into the fray. There is not a lot of protection against someone who falls for scams simply due to being under-informed. For that reason, it is important to know how to find online casinos that are safe, reliable, and trustworthy before engaging in any gambling or even financial information sharing with them.
So how does one find an online casino that is safe and trusted? Let’s take a look at some of the key areas that a prospective online gambler should consider before trusting an online casino with their funds.
What Is A Safe Online Casino?
The key attributes of what deems an online casino as ‘safe’ include a gambling license, oversight, confirmed abiding by regulations, and the ability for players to withdraw their funds or winnings within a reasonable timeframe.
But that is not all. An online casino should also offer responsive, professional customer service where any questions or concerns can be quickly and readily addressed in case any circumstantial situations should arise. That means a contact page with valid emails, telephone numbers, and even 24/7 instant messaging assistants should be readily available.
Paramount to all that, it is important to trust that the casino is being honest to their own terms. In other words, those terms and agreements that we (should) read when we sign up for an account on an online gaming forum, check out, and more importantly abided by the casino itself. Many online casinos with questionable ethical standing often sidestep their own terms in order to cheat their account holding players. These places take the term ‘the house always wins’ to a dangerous level, often accusing successful winners of being professionals if they win a lot of money, and denying them payouts. Many others use a system of complex bonuses on new members, imposing weekly withdrawal thresholds that could make it impossible for the member to withdraw all of their winnings. If you were to run into a situation like that at an actual casino, there are real people to hold accountable. With an online casino, possibly located in different countries under, regulated by much looser laws, players find themselves with no standing to fight an obvious injustice.
Aside from sites that make withdrawing money hard or impossible, there are other types of criminal violators. These include sites that will take the credit card information you provide them and sell it go whoever pays them the most, sites that impose bonuses or other ludicrous stipulations before players can withdraw, and sites that operate legitimately until their owners feel they have garnered enough money, at which point they shut down and take all of the money with them. With many of the casinos being run offshore, players have nowhere to turn and no recourse to recover their stolen funds.
Finding Safe Online Casinos
Much like being dealt out enough chips based on the money you provide in a brick-and-mortar casino, to play in an online casino, players need to provide the funds with which they will play. This involves depositing money into the casino site’s account. Entrusting that hard-earned money to the wrong casino can at best sour the experience of online gambling and at worst results in financial losses or even identity theft.
For those reasons, verifying the casino’s legitimacy is vital to enjoying the online gambling experience the way it was meant to. To avoid the hassles, prospective players interested in a particular gaming site can take a few steps to verify the legitimacy of the site they are dealing with.
Check Licencing And Regulation Protocols
First and foremost, it is important to determine whether a site is operating under the regulatory jurisdiction of an accredited licensing body or agency. Before depositing any funds towards the players’ account it is important to find this information on the casino’s website. If this information is not present, it is an immediate red flag that should disqualify this particular online casino from consideration.
The regulatory agencies work to ensure that the online casino site abides by legitimacy and fairness standards. Before being too happy about finding regulatory reference information though, be aware that not all regulatory bodies function the same. While some can be trusted to enforce consumer protection, others are glorified shells of regulatory presences, doing very little to actually enforce the practices they are tasked with upholding.
Payment Withdrawal Options And Speed
Processing payouts quickly and having multiple options by which to do so is a critical indicator of an online casino site’s legitimacy. The fact is that depositing and withdrawal of funds are quick and intuitive is not just a sign of convenience, it is a telltale sign of legitimacy. Performing these actions at the ready, especially considering the often huge number of players the online casino hosts at any one time, requires quite a sizable staff, as well as accounts that are readily funded.
That means that the customer service department of the site needs to be vast enough to process cash intake and output quickly. An organization that cannot staff such a team, causes their withdrawals to get backlogged. Requesting a withdrawal of funds that then take a long time to arrive makes players uneasy and worried about whether they will ever see their money again. If a site has adequate staff that they pay to quickly issue the withdrawals, they are more likely to be a legitimately operating business venture and are therefore more trustworthy.
Multiple payout options being present is another positive sign. It shows that the online casino is holding large sums for payment accounts, which means they are financially solvent. Less legitimate operations typically cut too many corners and siphon as much money as they can out of their gains to really make the heavy investment that it takes to establish a legitimately operational business.
How Easy The Site Is To Use
It goes without saying that a fully developed, legitimate business should have sites that are easy to traverse and navigate around. While the quality of the site is not a fully telling sign of legitimacy, it does make sense that more authentic sites will be able to invest in a better, more robust design of their online casino. A site with lots of confusing methods of starting play, or tough to sort out steps/rules for withdrawing money just feels like more of a scam because the methodology is more suited to confusing the users in how to play and retrieve winnings than to have them have fun and be long term players at the online casino.
History and Reputation
Users can figure quite a bit out about an online casino by reading about it. The key is to do some legwork and research multiple sources. If the casino pops up on multiple “best online casinos” listings, with extensive descriptions about why people like using those sites, it is a pretty credible lead to follow in terms of determining authenticity. When someone has been ripped off by a corrupt scam of an online casino, they will surely soil the site’s name online. If many people have been defrauded, they will most certainly make their opinions heard.
Relying on past customer’s testimonials is as telling for online casinos as they are for products sold at online retailers. If almost everyone rates it poorly, it’s probably a bad product. The well-known online casinos if ill repute can easily be found on many blacklists online, so these should be checked before depositing even a little bit of money into the funds for play.
How Are The Betting Odds?
Casino play is fun only when the player believes (and knows) that there is some chance of them winning at their preferred game. If there is no chance to win, no one would be foolish enough to play. If the odds are astronomically small at becoming a winner, no one risking money would want to take the chance of losing it all. Even the most ardent and daring gambler would steer clear of such places that promised nearly no chance of victory.
Many inauthentic online casino sites will offer winning odds that are so small that customers are better off not playing at all. Others are more clever in their devious ploys to defraud the winners. As many sites offer free games, they will allow the user to win a lot when nothing is at stake, but as soon as money is involved, the odds suddenly dissipate into near nothingness.
Good regulation of online casinos assures that the odds are fair for the players. By law, the minimum returns are set for the gambling sites that they must adhere to. That means that the odds of a player winning at a particular game should be comparable to the odds of winning in a brick and mortar casino.
Quality Of Customer Support
Less savory sites will offer customer support information, lest someone need to use it when they have an actual problem, they come to find out that the support is lacking, sometimes entirely. Those operations looking to scam players out of money instead of running a legitimate business rarely invest money into assuring that customers feel comfortable and taken care of. After all, their goal is to collect as much money as possible, not help customers be treated fairly, or to disperse winnings.
Before depositing any money, make some test calls to the customer service numbers. Ask questions, see how responsive and knowledgeable the staff is. Try emailing the email provided and see if and how fast you get a response, then evaluate the professionalism and quality of the provided answer. Check for the extent of an FAQ section as well. This will help you go a long way to find out how much effort the site is putting in to assure their customers’ satisfaction.
If there are very limited contact methods available, it is not a reason to jump to a conclusion of illegitimacy, but it is good to be guarded and cautious. Just like with withdrawal options, more methods of contact indicate a larger workforce, and that is typically indicative of a fully operational, authentic business.
Questionable Marketing
Check into how the online casinos market themselves. If you are getting emails and calls from the site, they are clearly chasing your business. A reputable online casino has far too many balls in the air to do something like that, as they have their hands full with running a business. Some questionable gaming enterprises will sometimes purchase user information and contact them to see if the player is interested in gambling at their casino. If the casino is coming for you to come to play, you best avoid considering them a viable option.
Conclusion
Finding a safe online casino takes effort and research, but it’s worth it in the end. Recognizing common-sense signs of questionable business tactics and reading the indicators can help you enjoy a satisfying, safe, and fun online gaming experience.