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Online casinos are less accountable than their real-world counterparts. It’s just a statement of fact. In what is in many ways the beauty of the internet, it costs very little to start something up and there are very few restrictions.

In the real world, you have to buy property and fill out all the forms for that, then you have to get licenses for certain things, hire people, and most importantly, show your face. Online you can just buy a domain name, maybe buy some software online, and then you have an online casino. You can hire out people without necessarily meeting them, and you can start advertising all sorts of places, all under the mask of anonymity.

So we’ve established that people who run online casinos do not have to reveal a lot about themselves and are not well regulated. The problem is that this opens the internet up for scams. The low start-up costs make it possible for all sorts of deviants to start running crooked establishments, without making themselves accountable to you as customers. Then again, there are also plenty of online casinos that provide great services that customers really want and enjoy, and for much less hassle than going to Vegas. But how do you tell the scams from the diamonds?

This is where I like to employ an idea I learned from a book called The Undercover Economist, by Tim Harford. The problem Harford describes in his book is one of used cars. Just like there are great internet businesses as well as scams, there are used car lots that good cars and those that sell terrible ones. How do you find a lot that’s selling a good used car?

Well, let’s assume you do buy a used car and it breaks down within a couple weeks. You won’t go back to the lot you went to ever again, and you’ll probably tell all your friends to do the same. The lot probably won’t see any return business, if other customers are like you, and it will soon get a bad reputation and go out of business.

But here’s the thing, the used car lot owner knows he’s selling bad cars. He got them cheaply, and he’ll sell them to you at a high price. He knows he won’t get return customers, and he knows he’ll have to leave town before too long, but his initial profits will be high enough where that won’t be a problem. He’ll just leave town and buy some bad cars somewhere else.

So, as a customer, you want to buy a car from someone who’s planning on having return customers, someone who’s planning on being around for a while. But how do you know?

You just need to look into how much the proprietor is investing in the business. Would you be more inclined to trust a tiny corner lot with card board signs, or a great big auto showroom with thousands of cars? The big lot and the showroom aren’t necessarily there because they help the car buying process; they’re there to tell the customer that they plan on being around for a while.  Dealerships are willing to spend large sums on a big lot and showroom because they are confident they will get a good reputation and recoup the costs. The higher the startup expenditure, the more confidence they have in their product, and the more you can trust buying from them.

Now let’s tie this back into online casinos. What’s the equivalent of a big showroom? First, look at web design. Is the website state-of-the-art with all the information you could possibly want presented in a very aesthetically pleasing form? Or does it look like something out of a high school HTML textbook?

Next, look at the software. Did they buy software from a high-end company, or higher a few programmers to make it over the weekend? Are the graphics fantastic? Are there a wide variety of games?

Then check the casinos reputation. Google it for starters, and look around on gambling websites like Wizard of Odds, Gambling Planet, and here at Gambling City for reviews. Find a casino that’s trusted.