Make sure you choose a suitable online casino deposit option

Although the internet is clearly a valuable resource that has significantly changed how many of us live our lives, it has also created a whole new area of potential risk particularly when making financial transactions online. Nevertheless a great many of us now do our banking and pay many of our bills online, and of course online shopping is now very big business. Here at onlinecasino.ie we are of course primarily interested in the online gambling sector, particularly the online casinos which again are proving a popular way for us to occupy our leisure time. However there is one common factor running through all of these internet activities and that is how we pay for the goods and services we want, and in the case of online casinos what are the best deposit options. The most important aspect of any decision relating to financial activities online has undoubtedly got to be the security of our personal data, but there are many other factors which we need to take into account depending on the nature of the financial transaction we propose to carry out. Generally speaking most internet sites dealing with the public offer a full and comprehensive range of payment options, and the online casinos are no exception. Almost all the online casinos offer us a range of deposit options designed to meet almost everybody’s individual requirements, ranging from popular credit cards to e-wallets, but what are the other factors we should consider when deciding how to fund playing our casino games online.

Let’s start with the option of using a credit card to transfer funds to our online casino account. There are often very good reasons for using a credit card when purchasing goods or services online, but do they apply to funding an online casino account. Prior to the introduction of online shopping most of us made our purchasing decisions based on the atmosphere and service we got when visiting a particular store, and we also judged how much trust we could put in a company to resolve any problems through face to face contact with their staff in the store. Shopping on the internet however is not quite so easy particularly if the supplier is new to you, so many of us automatically reach for a credit card when purchasing products online because the credit card companies will generally refund your money if you do not get the quality of product you expected, or did not get the product at all. Unfortunately such considerations do not apply when what you are doing is buying the option to gamble by playing casino games. With the best will in the world you would not expect the credit card company to refund your money if you did not enjoy the casino games you chose to play. There is however another problem with using a credit card as an online casino deposit option, and that is that the banks do not like us using a credit card for anything related to gambling, so much so that they all automatically apply a surcharge to any credit card transaction concerned with gambling. This penalty can be as high as 2% of the transaction value in some cases, but whatever the size of this charge it reduces your chances of winning. You could argue that the banks are overstepping the mark by imposing such a penalty, but using a credit card as an online casino deposit option is effectively gambling with borrowed money and that is never a good idea. If you’re still not convinced there is another additional cost associated with using a credit card as a deposit option because such a transaction is always considered to be a cash transaction and therefore attracts interest from day one at credit card rates. Why incur all these additional costs when there are better options.

One alternative is to use a debit card as an online casino deposit option. Most people have a debit card connected to their current account, and all the online casinos will accept most debit cards as a deposit option to fund playing casino games. With one or two exceptions the banks will not charge you for using a debit card to fund gambling on casino games and of course there is no interest to pay because the money must be in your account for the payment to go through. There are however two potential negative aspects of using a debit card as a deposit option. The first is that the online casino will clearly have access to your current account details, and whilst we have no reason to suppose that any of the online casinos on our recommended list do not take data protection very seriously indeed it is a factor to consider. It is also true that your bank may not charge you, but they will know that you are gambling and that in itself may effect credit decisions in the future. Both of these potential negative aspects would also apply to using a cheque to transfer funds to an online casino account or even an electronic money transfer.

Before we go on to consider the use of an e-wallet as an online casino deposit option, there is one other alternative accepted by most online casinos and that is a per-loaded card such as Paysafe or Ucash. These pre-loaded cards are a perfectly good way to fund playing casino games, although 888 will not transfer any money back to any of these cards from your account, which is very inconvenient. We should also mention that in Ireland both Paddy Power and Ladbrokes allow their online casino customers to manage their accounts using cash over the counter at their high street shops, which has got to be as secure an option as you can get.

Finally there is the e-wallet, the best known of which is Pay Pal but both Neteller and Moneybookers are also generally accepted as an online casino deposit option. There are no charges and no interest payments, nor does the online casino operator have access to your bank details. An added bonus for some of us is that your bank will not even know what you are using you e-wallet for.