Casino Payment Methods

Online casinos are just that of course – places where you can game online, from the comfort of home, the office (ooh, naughty!) or even while on the hoof, thanks to the advent of mobile gaming.

But whereas in the old days of the Penny Arcade, ‘step up and play each machine seemed to say’, as Roy Orbison once sang, how do you physically put coins into your desktop or mobile?

Or, as at a bricks and mortar casino where you can purchase chips or play with a card - surely that doesn’t translate onto the online equivalent either, unless you have state-of-the art technology allowing you to insert your card into your device?

Well, as to the first question, of course you can’t do that; the second point is nearer the mark, as credit/debit cards, particularly Visa and Mastercard, are still one of the commonest casino payment methods of them all.

And rightly so – it’s a reliable, long trusted way to pay, which will be accepted in the vast majority of jurisdictions and which will enable you to keep a record of what and how much you have spent.

There’s a whole host of different online casino payment methods

And the list is growing all the time - so if Visa or Mastercard do not suit - you can rest assured that you won’t be left out.

These can be split up into two specific groups – those where you need a bank account and those where you do not.

The first group, casino online payment solutions tied to a specific account, enable you to make secure payment online via digital encryption. These are usually more or less instant, and you would obviously need to have set up an account and gone through security clearance before starting to use it; Paypal is a good example of this – at one time it distanced itself from the online gambling sector and couldn’t be used for this purpose, which is testimony to how far the industry has come since then, as Paypal is now a common and popular secure gambling payment provider.

A subgroup of this type is the eWallet variety, where you load up a service with funds from your account, and go on to make payments from the eWallet to the merchant – in this case the online casino. Skrill and Neteller both fit into this category.

The second category of online casino payment providers is those which aren’t tied to a bank account. One variety of this method is a pre-paid card which you can buy at any participating outlet for a set amount of money and which has a unique number on it (it is this multi-digit number which is the key to payment, not the card itself, so you can throw away the latter - only don’t forget the number!).

The advantage of these payment methods betting online is that they don’t leave a ‘paper trail’, which suits some players, and they are also available over a wide geographical area.

Actually some of these types of services don’t even require a card - you just get a number. Paysafecard and Ukash are both good examples of these payment providers gaming online.

There are a few other aspects of secure payment methods gaming online. For instance, some providers are region-specific, for instance in the burgeoning Russian market there are solutions such as QiWi (though this is also increasingly becoming available worldwide).

Then there are more traditional methods like good old-fashioned wire transfer, though the latter can take several days for payment to arrive, so they aren’t the first choice for many gamers.

And finally, no item on payment providers betting online would be complete without a brief mention of Bitcoin.

There are a few casinos which accept this controversial crypto-currency - including Vera&John; - but in general it may be some time before it is an industry standard for payment. Nonetheless, watch this space for more developments here and in all other areas of online casinos too!