When it comes to gambling on a sporting event most of us probably used to pay for our bets as we went along, and very few people would have opened an account with their local betting shop unless they wanted to place their bets on the telephone. That situation is however rapidly changing as online gambling becomes increasingly popular so more and more of us are likely to have an account with at least one internet gambling site, even when if we only ever bet on sporting events because it is so convenient. If however we enjoy playing casino games at an online casino it is essential that we open an account with the site operator in order to play the games, which then raises the question as to what is the best way to fund an online casino account, or indeed any online gambling account. Every online casino offers a wide range of acceptable deposit options for their customers to choose from, but it is important that people are aware that some of those options do not represent the best value for money. As the internet becomes more and more part of our daily lives most of us will almost certainly have bought something online or even paid a bill online, and for very good reasons we probably used a credit card to do so. Using a credit card for most online financial transactions is often the best advice because most credit cards have a built-in insurance element which covers us in the event of unsatisfactory goods or service from the supplier. It also means that the internet site operator does not have access to the details of your primary bank account so your personal data security is better than for instance using a debit card. Most major credit cards are of course included in the list of acceptable deposit options offered by almost every online casino, but using a credit card for anything involving gambling will cost you money. Obviously using a credit card to fund playing online casino games is also effectively gambling with borrowed money even if you fully intend to pay off the whole balance at the end of the month, and gambling with borrowed money is never a good idea. Paying money into an online casino account using a credit card is also considered to be a cash transaction in the same way as withdrawing cash from an ATM with a credit card, and because of that interpretation you will therefore be charged interest on that transaction from day one at credit card rates. If neither of those two factors are sufficient to persuade you to put the credit card away, any credit card transaction involving gambling will also be subject to a surcharge of at least 2% of the deposit.
Here at onlinecasino.ie we can only advise against gambling with borrowed money, but almost all the banks go further and actually penalise anyone using a credit card to fund playing casino games or betting on the outcome of a sporting event. Remember that there is already a house edge in every casino game you play online, so incurring additional costs unnecessarily makes no sense whatsoever, particularly when there are so many better deposit options available. We should also point out that in Ireland you may even be penalised for using some debit cards to fund playing online casino games because of the way some banks process the transactions. Some of us already use an e-wallet account such as Pay Pal to purchase products online, so let’s look at the benefits of using this type of account to fund playing casino games online. All the online casinos on our recommended list include one or more e-wallets in their list of acceptable deposit options, and there are significant advantages in using an e-wallet account to transfer money into an online casino account. First and foremost there will be no additional cost associated with using an e-wallet account to fund playing casino games because your bank will not know what you are using the account for. That in itself is a significant improvement in your privacy, but using an e-wallet account as a deposit option also means that the site operator does not have access to your main bank account details so your data security is again improved. Many people also prefer to use an e-wallet account to fund their online casino account because it helps them control their gambling budget. In common with using a debit card, an e-wallet account will only allow you to spend what money you have in the account which means that you can control what you spend on playing casino games or any form of gambling come to that.
That brings us nicely to another of the online casino deposit options we should consider, the pre-loaded card. Most online casinos will accept pre-loaded cards such as PaySafe or Ucash as a deposit option, and using this type of card has many of the benefits we have seen in the e-wallet accounts. If any of our readers have not come across this type of card they operate in much the same way as the pre-loaded foreign currency cards many of us use when travelling abroad. You simply transfer money onto the card from your current account and then use the card in the same way as you would use a credit or debit card. Again you cannot spend more than you have loaded onto the card, so budgeting is much easier, and using a pre-loaded card also offers the same privacy and security advantages as using an e-wallet account. There is one other method of managing an online casino account which we should point out before we close, and that is using cash. In Ireland both Paddy Power and Ladbrokes allow their customers to manage their online accounts using cash at one of their high street betting shops. Clearly if you have relatively easy access to one of these betting shops and enjoy the casino games these two sites offer then there is no better way to manage an online casino account.