There is a wide choice of online casino deposit options but choose wisely

There is no doubt that the internet has been extremely beneficial for most of us, and has for many of us made our working lives much easier. The internet has even created a large number of job opportunities which in turn have helped to mitigate for the loss of some more traditional jobs which are no longer available in our economy. It has also provided us with a whole new range of leisure activities, including of course our passion here at onlinecasino.ie, namely playing online casino games. As with many other things in life however the benefits of the internet are unfortunately accompanied by some potential downsides, particularly when it comes to carrying out financial transactions online. Although most of us are very aware of the precautions we need to take when managing our bank accounts online or when we are purchasing goods or services online, we still choose to carry out these financial transactions because it is often so much more convenient and allows us time to pursue our other interests. One of those other interests may well be playing casino games online, but that leisure activity also entails carrying out a financial transaction over the internet and therefore we should take the same amount of care over how we deposit money into an online casino account as we would when paying for anything else online. The risks are of course hopefully quite different because we are confident that all the online casinos on our recommended list have the necessary management systems in place to protect our financial and personal security, so it is our privacy and costs which we need to consider rather than fraud. All the online casinos on our recommended list offer a wide range of different deposit options designed to suit all our preferences, but some of these deposit options will cost you money unnecessarily and others may also affect your privacy. As we have already said, when it comes to buying goods online one of the precautions many of us take is to use a credit card particularly when dealing with an internet site for the first time. The main reason for using a credit card for this type of online transaction is the built-in insurance element which promises to compensate you if the product or service proves to be faulty or unsatisfactory in some way. Using a credit card also ensures that the most you can lose in the event of fraud is defined by your credit limit, whereas using a debit card opens up your current account details which may be more costly in the long run. Neither of these benefits of using a credit card apply when it comes to transferring money into an online casino account however, and although most major credit cards feature on almost every list of online casino deposit options there are more negatives than positives in using a credit card for this purpose.

Perhaps the biggest downside is that using a credit card to fund playing casino games online will actually cost you more money because almost all the banks will apply a surcharge on any credit card transaction involving gambling. That surcharge can be as much as 2% of the value of the deposit, which when added to the house edge which applies to every online casino game reduces the chances of winning still further. We should also point out that using a credit card to make a deposit into an online casino account will be considered to be a cash transaction in the same way as withdrawing money from an ATM using a credit card, and will therefore attract interest from day one further diminishing your potential winnings. In some circumstances, particularly in Ireland, using a debit card as an online casino deposit option may also incur penalty charges although there will of course be no interest payable. We hope that we have been able to persuade our readers that neither of these forms of plastic are the best option when it comes to funding their online casino games, particularly as there are much better deposit options available on every online casino site. The most obvious of these alternatives is what is known as an e-wallet account such as Pay Pal or Neteller. An e-wallet is a totally separate bank account which can be used for a wide variety of internet transactions, including shopping and of course providing the stake money to play online casino games. There are no penalty charges or interest because there has to be enough money in the account to cover the transaction, and just as important for many of us our personal bank account provider will not know what we are doing with the money in our e-wallet account, which in turn vastly improves our privacy. Using an e-wallet account as an online casino deposit option also means that the online casino site operator has no access to your primary personal banking details, which again greatly improves your personal security. An e-wallet account is very easy to set up, but if for some reason you do not want to use this method to fund playing casino games online there are still other deposit options which are better than using a credit card. Many of us for instance are used to using a pre-loaded foreign currency card when travelling abroad on holiday or on business, but they may not know that there are similar pre-loaded cards which can be used to transfer money into an online casino account. Again almost all the online casinos on our recommended list feature at least one pre-loaded card in their list of acceptable deposit options, with PaySafe and Ucash just two of the most popular of this type of card. Using a pre-loaded card as a deposit option also has the benefit of helping us to manage our gambling budget. Clearly we all want to win when we play casino games online, but if we only load what we are prepared to lose on a pre-loaded card, that is also the maximum we can lose in any one session.