Take care when choosing your online casino deposit options

The internet is clearly a very useful tool in helping us manage our daily lives more efficiently and of course also provides us with many more options to help us enjoy our leisure time, but it can also cause us problems if we do not use it wisely. Our newspapers and other news outlets regularly feature stories of internet fraud and widespread hacking of our personal data, and those warnings inevitably lead to most of us being extremely wary of any online financial transactions we engage in. That caution regarding internet transactions is obviously a very good idea and clearly helps protect us from being the victims of online fraud, but fraud is not the only danger we face when spending money online. The fact that you have logged on to onlinecasino.ie leads us to assume that you are either interested in starting to play casino games at an online casino, or you are already playing casino games online and need a bit of advice. The one thing that new and existing online casino games players have in common is that they all need to deposit money into an online casino account before they can begin to enjoy playing the games, and that is also where a bit of advice may save you money. Every online casino offers a wide and comprehensive range of  deposit options to enable us to select the best one for our personal circumstances, but it is important that we point out that some of those options will undoubtedly cost you more money than it should. The problem does not lie with the online casino operators however because it is clearly in everyone’s interest that they offer a full range of deposit options, it is the banks who are responsible for the additional costs associated with some of those deposit options. When it comes to purchasing goods or services online many of us would automatically reach for a credit card for that sort of transaction because of the built-in insurance element in the event that the product proves unsatisfactory or indeed if it fails to arrive at all. Using a credit card is also recommended for most internet transactions because it protects your current account details and your credit limit provides a limit on any potential losses through fraud. Unfortunately although most major credit cards are included in the deposit options offered by all the online casinos, using a credit card to deposit money into an online casino account is the most expensive option you could choose. We should also point out that the additional costs associated with using a credit card for an online casino deposit do not only apply to online casino deposits, the same applies to using a credit card to transfer money into an online sports gambling account because both of these transactions are related to gambling and that triggers the application of a surcharge by all of the banks issuing the cards.

For reasons of their own all the banks object to their credit cards being used for anything involving gambling, so they will almost always apply a surcharge of as much as 2% on any transaction of that sort. To be fair to the banks, using a credit card as an online deposit option is effectively gambling with borrowed money even if you religiously pay the balance every month, and nobody would recommend that. The surcharge is also not the only additional unnecessary cost associated with using a credit card to fund playing online casino games, the payment will also be treated as a cash transaction by the banks and will therefore attract interest from day one irrespective as to how careful you are to pay off the balance every month. Before we go on to the other deposit options which will not cost you any money we should also warn that some Irish online casino customers may also face surcharges when using a debit card as an online casino deposit option because of the way in which some Irish debit cards are processed.

We are clear therefore that we would not recommend the use of either a credit card or a debit card to transfer funds to an online casino account, so what are the alternatives. Every online casino includes at least one e-wallet account in their list of acceptable deposit options, and there are many reasons why using an e-wallet account as a deposit option is a good idea. The first of those reasons is that there will be no additional costs applied to the transaction because your bank will not know what you are doing with the money in your e-wallet account. The second important reason why an e-wallet account is a good way to fund an online casino account is that the online casino site operator has no access to your main bank account details, therefore this method of payment also increases your personal security. For those of our readers who may not recognise the term e-wallet, the most well-known e-wallet account supplier is Pay Pal, but a Neteller account is also accepted by most online casinos. The other form of recommended online casino deposit option is the use a a pre-payment card such as PaySafe or Ucash. Both of these pre-loaded cards work in exactly the same way as the pre-loaded foreign currency cards many of us use when we go abroad on holiday or on business. You simply load the card with the money you intend to use for playing online casino games and use the card to move that money into your account in the same way as you would use any other card. Once again your bank will not know what you are doing with the money on that card, nor will the online casino operator have access to your banking details. Using a pre-loaded card as an online casino deposit option also has another advantage over other methods of funding the playing of casino games online, and that is that it is easier to control your gambling budget. You cannot spend more than you have loaded on the card.