Be sure to choose the right online casino deposit option

Regular visitors to onlinecasino.ie will know that one of our prime objectives is to help new online casino games players get the best possible experience of what we consider to be a very enjoyable leisure activity. We do this in various different ways ranging from our regular online casino reviews from which we are able to compile our list of recommended online casino sites, through to detailing all the rules of most of the traditional casino games on our individual casino games pages. From time to time we also offer advice and even cautions about some of the potential pitfalls new casino games players might come across when they start playing. One of the most important topics we often cover in this advice is the question of what is the best way to pay money into an online casino account in order to fund playing casino games. Every online casino offers a wide variety of deposit options to their customers in an attempt to ensure that the process is as easy as possible and that there is a suitable option for almost everybody wanting to play casino games. Unfortunately not all of those common deposit options are as good as they may appear and one or two may even cost you extra money in charges. Nowadays most of us use the internet at some time or another to pay bills or make online purchases, and many of us would then automatically reach for our credit card to pay for those goods or services particularly if we have not used the internet site before and do not therefore know how reliable it is. Using a credit card in these circumstances is often the best solution because of the guaranteed insurance element provided by the card issuer should anything go wrong, and It also prevents access to your main current account banking details and limits any potential losses due to fraud to within your agreed credit balance. There are however two very important reasons why a credit card is not one of the best online casino deposit options you could choose. The first of these is fairly obvious but we feel it should be said, and that is that using a credit card to fund playing casino games is effectively gambling with borrowed money even if you religiously pay off the entire balance every month. We firmly believe that there is never any reason to gamble with borrowed money, but there is another perhaps even more convincing reason not to use a credit card as an online casino deposit option and that is the additional bank charges you will inevitably incur in doing so. Here at onlinecasino.ie we can only warn that gambling with borrowed money is not a good idea, but the banks will go one step further and actually apply a surcharge of up to 2% on any credit card transaction involving gambling. They will also treat such a transaction as a cash transaction equivalent to withdrawing money from an ATM using a credit card and will therefore charge interest from day one at credit card interest rates.

Playing casino games at an online casino is no different to any other form of gambling in that there is always a house edge in the favour of the casino or the bookmaker, so opting to pay additional charges to use a credit card to fund your gambling makes no obvious sense at all particularly when there are much better alternative deposit options available at every online casino site. Before we go on to discuss our recommended online casino deposit options we should point out that some Irish debit cards may also incur additional charges when used for the purposes of gambling because of the way their transactions are processed, so although using a debit card to fund gambling activities is clearly more acceptable than using a credit card it may still cost you extra money.

Every online casino on our recommended list offers at least one e-wallet account supplier among their list of acceptable deposit options, and for many reasons an e-wallet is an excellent way to fund playing casino games online. Pay Pal and Neteller are just two of the most well-known e-wallet providers and both are often found on the online casinos’ list of deposit options. An e-wallet is an entirely separate bank account which can be used for a huge variety of online financial transactions, including of course funding an online casino account. There are no additional charges associated with using an e-wallet account for gambling purposes because your bank has no way of knowing what you are using your e-wallet account for. Your personal banking details are also more secure because the online casino site operator does not have access to your main personal bank account details. Both of these factors dramatically improve your privacy and provide increased security in terms of reducing your vulnerability to identity theft. Your e-wallet account can of course also be funded in any way you choose, including a credit card if that is your only option, but that still remains the worst possible solution. There is another perfectly acceptable way to fund playing casino games online and that is a pre-loaded card. Many more of us are now travelling abroad on holiday or on business, and some of us nowadays also choose to use pre-loaded foreign currency cards when we do so. Most online casinos also now include a selection of pre-loaded cards on their list of acceptable deposit options and these card operate in exactly the same way that the foreign currency cards operate. PaySafe and Ucash are just two of the pre-loaded cards which are commonly featured on the list of deposit options. Once again there are no additional charges incurred when using a pre-loaded card to fund playing casino games, but they are also useful in controlling our gambling budget. If you use a pre-loaded card as your only funding option you can only play with the money you have put on the card so you cannot be tempted to spend more.