With more than 2,000 online casinos in operation, it would be a stretch to call more than a couple of handfuls of them ”extremely reliable.” The sad reality is you never know the safety-level of an online casino – at least not by looking at the casino’s website.

Casino sites would never tell if you if their games are fair or payouts processed in a timely manner. Perhaps they refuse to honor the terms of their bonuses? Or provide rude customer service? You’ll find out all of this only after you’ve made the deposit and it’s too late.

Furthermore, most online reviews lie or decide not to tell you the negatives because they’re getting paid by the casinos. (We were unable to make a top-list of 100 casinos precisely because there aren’t that many worth listing.)

Do Online Casinos Cheat Players?

Not all internet casinos cheat their customers. You’re more likely to go through a horrible user experience than being downright cheated (problems with money transactions, lagging software, rude customers service, etc.). In any case, whether casino websites cheat or provide abysmal service, we should do our best to avoid them.

Successful online casinos have no reason to cheat their customers to make money – they already have the odds on their side. For every bet you make, you get less back on average.

If you place one dollar on red in roulette, they give you 97.3 cents back; if you put one dollar into a slot machine, they give you anywhere from 75 to 98 cents back. A single outcome is always either a win or a loss, but in the long run, as you look at the average return for all of your bets, your results should reflect the return percentage.

With that said, among all the incompetent casinos, there are rogue operators as well. The Affactive network is an example from the past couple of years: they cheated their players by often not allowing them to withdraw any winnings, meanwhile they paid affiliate marketers (the writers of those dishonest online reviews I previously referred to) lots of money to keep promoting their brands… and to not to mention the problems other customers were having.

No wonder they were unable to pay the affiliate marketers a lot of money – they weren’t paying any money out to customers!

Thankfully, that branch of online casinos has already gone out of operation.

But the point is, cheating does happen. To make matters worse, you’re going to get dishonest information from most websites that review internet casino sites. We do our best to review online casinos and other gambling sites accurately and honestly (we refuse to promote just about every casino that approaches us because they don’t fulfill our ranking criteria, no matter how much money they offer us) but we’re a rare breed.

If I Use a Credit Card, Will My Information be Safe?

You can never be 100% safe at internet casinos. I’m not an expert on the topic but I doubt your information – especially your credit card information (quite valuable among thieves) – will be 100% secure either. It’s all the more reason to make sure you’re playing at a legitimate casino.

To secure your credit card information when depositing to a casino, you can use ”e-wallets” such as Skrill and Neteller (unavailable for those living in the US). That way you’ll never expose your credit card details directly to the casino; instead, you send money from your credit card to the e-wallet and then send the money from the e-wallet to the online casino.

An e-wallet is an additional security layer for your credit card but also more complicated to use. After all, it’s a simple process to make a card deposit: you enter the details, press ”submit” and you’re golden. It’s pretty much just as complex when requesting a withdrawal (meaning not complex at all).

With an e-wallet, you have to make a deposit to the e-wallet account before you can deposit money to your casino account (this usually takes anywhere from one to 5 business days). Once you have money on your e-wallet account, the process of depositing money to an online casino site is just as fast and simple as with a card.

Unfortunately, U.S. online gamblers are prohibited from using e-wallet services (with maybe the exception of those playing at state-licensed sites in New Jersey, Nevada and Delaware). U.S. gamblers have to resort to money transfer services (Moneygram and Western Union) if card deposits are unavailable to them.

In short: your credit card information is safer at the most legitimate online casinos which likely take customer safety serious and have money to hire the best security experts, but it’s never 100% safe online, and you might be wise to an e-wallet to make sure nothing bad happens.

Horrible Experiences

In addition to being honest and respecting the privacy of your information, safe online casinos also provide a top-class customer experience. If, for example, you run into plenty of errors on the casino site, it makes the customer feel uneasy. If they have errors with basic site functions, what other types of errors will they have with more complicated (and important) functions?

Customer service is another factor that affects the user experience. If you’re being serviced in a rude and unhelpful manner, would you say call the site reliable? I want to know that I’ll always be helped to the best of the customer service personnels’ abilities — otherwise I don’t feel safe about keeping or playing with my hard-earned money on the site.

So How Do You Know If Your Casino Is Safe?

Do the Research
Follow daily news and online discussions for a year or two and you start to get a sense of the market. The other option is to read gambling reviews from informational websites, hoping you’ll be able to distinguish the honest information from the promotional stuff.