When it comes to gambling in online casinos, one of the biggest challenges is figuring out a reliable banking option to use. One of the simplest methods is to use an e-wallet such as PayPal.
E-wallets are internet sites that store a person’s credit card information and other payment data to make it easier to complete online transactions. Not only is PayPal one of the most popular e-wallets in the world, but it is also one of the most secure. This makes them an extremely convenient option when trying to fund our online casino accounts.
Now that we have convinced you of how useful PayPal is, here is a list of the very best casino sites available to you that accept PayPal as a banking option. We spent a long time researching and testing these sites, so at least look at the list for a millisecond!
- Betway Casino
- 888 Casino
- Jackpot City Casino
If you were wondering why none of these sites are accepting customers from the USA, that is because PayPal refuses to facilitate gambling transactions in the USA as well as any other country where online gambling is illegal.
For the readers who reside in regions where online gambling is legal, we will now examine exactly how PayPal works and if it is a good option for funding an online casino.
How PayPal Works
It really cannot be any simpler to use PayPal to play in online casinos than it already is. The first thing we need to do is go to the casino’s website and sign-up for an account. After that, we will be able to link our bank account and debit card to our PayPal account. Once this is complete, you will be able to use PayPal in the same way you use your debit card online.
Now that we have our PayPal account setup and a good PayPal-friendly casino site from the list above, we are ready to deposit our money and gamble! To do this, we first need to sign-in to our casino account. From there we just click on the “Cashier” option and then find the PayPal icon. Finally, we just need to enter the amount of money we wish to deposit and a promotional code if we have one. This will use the money in our PayPal account by default, and if there is no money in there it will grab funds from our linked bank account instead.
PayPal History
Back in the year 2000, two companies named Confinity and X.com joined together to form the e-wallet known as PayPal. In the year 2003, they were one of the most popular payment methods for eBay users, prompting eBay to buy them out for a whopping $1.5 billion.
Unfortunately, this was the same year that they dropped out of the internet gambling scene. It wasn’t until 2010 that PayPal re-entered the gambling market, although they still exclude the USA when it comes to offshore gambling transactions to this day.
The only time they do serve US customers is on the regulated online poker sites like WSOP.com. They are currently one of the safest options for online gamblers to deposit and withdraw money quickly from any accepted online casinos.
Transaction Fees
Fees? What fees? Depositing onto an online casino with PayPal is free of charge. The one exception is that when you try to use a credit or a debit card to fund your PayPal account, they charge a 2.9% fee.
You need to fund your PayPal account before depositing onto an online casino unless your PayPal account is linked to your bank account already, so be sure to link them as soon as possible.
Using your bank account to fund your PayPal account is completely free so we recommend this option if it is at all possible. Transferring from one person’s PayPal account to another person’s PayPal account is also free of charge.
Customer Service
If we come across any issues while using PayPal’s services to deposit or withdraw money from casino sites, it is easy to get ahold of PayPal’s customer support team. After we log in to our PayPal account and scroll to the bottom of the page there is a “Contact Us” link. From here we have many different options to get ahold of PayPal customer service.
If we do not feel like dealing with customer support, one of the options we can choose from when trying to resolve our problem is to take it to the user forums. This is a place where we can ask other people on the internet about our specific problem and see if anyone else has been experiencing the same thing.
For those who feel brave enough to talk to a support person, their customer service number is 1-888-221-1161. If we log into our account, click on the “Contact Us” link, and then click on the “Call Customer Support” link, we will be provided with a one-time passcode. This unique number will identify us automatically when we call so that we do not have to go through the entire process of confirming our identity.
If you are one of those people that hates using the phone but you also do not want to use the user forums, you can simply email them. Since they do not provide us with an email address, we are forced to go through their resolution center which can also be found by clicking on the “Contact Us” link at the bottom of your account dashboard. Once here, we simply choose a topic from the dropdown menu that we want to write to them about and then write our message in the field provided. They will then reply to us via whatever email address we used to sign-up on PayPal with.
Reliability
Although we personally have had no bad experiences with PayPal, it is clear from our research that others who have used PayPal to deposit onto casino sites have not been so lucky. It’s never a good thing when you google “PayPal shadiness” and you get blasted with tons of news articles.
The practices that they were charged with include deceptive advertising, abusively charging deferred interest, enrolling customers in PayPal credit without their knowledge or consent, and engaging in illegal billing practices. Yikes.
The good news is that they were slapped with a $25 million fine by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2015 for this illegal activity, but this is a drop in the bucket compared to their $1.4 billion net income in 2016. Reportedly, $15 million of this was given back to consumers who were wronged, and the other $10 million was the penalty for their crimes. This is great because it shows that online gamblers will get paid back in these types of scenarios. It also might be the reason why PayPal seems to have cleaned up their act since then. We cannot find any proof of these illegal practices still taking place after 2015, so they should be safe to use now to fund your online casino accounts.
Verdict
We believe that PayPal is one of the simplest and most convenient payment methods available for funding online casino accounts. We especially love that the only time there are fees involved is when a debit or credit card is used to fund our PayPal account.
It is concerning that PayPal has been convicted of quite a few illegal practices. We hope that they learned their lesson from this ordeal and it seems like this might be the case since we cannot find any proof of further scandals since then.