How can you be sure your casino gaming experience is a safe, secure one? How do you know your personal information will be protected and your private financial records will remain private? Whether you play slots or play keno, enjoy roulette or prefer craps, if you play online casino games, you should be asking yourself these important questions.
Their unfortunate answer, however, is that there is no way of insuring that nothing, never and no one, ever will tamper with your identify and information. This is as true in a bank as it is in your office as it is in an online casino.
Still, there are measures you can take to ensure that when you play roulette or bet at blackjack your personal details are not on display and available for the taking to any two-bit computer hacker with a stick of gum and a USB cable. Here, in the first of our gambling articles focused on online casino safety and security, Gambling City highlights what to look for in the best online casinos.
To start, let’s just acknowledge that online casinos are less accountable than their real-world counterparts. It’s a simple 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. You have to receive licenses and hire staff. Most importantly, you have to show your face. Online businesses need only a domain name and some software. Voila! Online Casino! They can then hire out people without necessarily meeting them, and 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 operate crooked establishments, without making themselves accountable to you as customers.
There are, of course, plenty of online casinos that provide great services customers really want and enjoy, and for much less hassle than going to Vegas. But how do you tell the scam artists from the legitimate businesses?
Let’s look at an idea proposed in Tim Hartford’s bestselling book, The Undercover Economist. The problem Harford describes in his book is one of used cars. In used car sales, as with internet start-ups, there are those that sell quality items and those that sell souped-up jalopies. 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. If other customers have an experience similar to yours, the lot will probably not receive much repeat business. 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. He also knows his initial profits will be huge, so he doesn’t care. He’ll just leave town and sell junk cars somewhere else.
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?
Simple: Look into how much the proprietor is investing in his business.
Would you be more inclined to trust a tiny corner lot with cardboard signs, or a great big auto showroom with thousands of cars? The big lot and the showroom aren’t there because they help buyers purchase cars. They’re there to tell the customer that the business is long-term.
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 among finding-a-good-casino-tips: look at web design. Is the website state-of-the-art? Is it user friendly? Is information presented in an aesthetically pleasing format? Or does it look like something out of an HTML textbook?
Next in line for finding-a-good-casino-tips: look at the online casino software. Is it from a reputable, high-end company, or made of Scotch tape and tin cans? Are the graphics fantastic? Are there a wide variety of games? In short, is the online casino software company name a name you trust?
And finally, the last of our finding-a-good-casino-tips: check the casino’s reputation. Google it for starters, and look around on casino gaming websites for reviews. Find a casino gaming site that’s trusted. The best online casinos will be reviewed by numerous e-magazines and portals like ours. Don’t end up with a lemon.