While online gambling is more accessible than ever, you need to be careful when choosing a casino. With the Internet comes a degree of anonymity, which allows fraudsters and less-than-reputable establishments to get away with taking people’s money. You don’t want that to be you, so you should research any website before putting your money into it.
With that said, it’s best to go with popular sites that have a good reputation for offering high-quality Casino Games where you can actually win. We go through all of that and more with these useful tips for choosing the best online casino for you.
Check The Background
First, you should check the background, and we don’t mean the backdrop of the site’s pages. Respectable websites, especially those that handle money, are often treated like a piece of digital real estate. They have a clear history of ownership and a means of contacting the owner. It takes a lot of effort to build and run a successful site that handles money, so the owners usually want to be known.
So, if the owners of a site are shady or uncontactable, you need to start asking questions. Did the site pop up overnight? Are there customer complaints online about the website? Do they have issues paying their customers? Each of these can be a red flag for an online casino.
By researching the background of the site and the individuals/companies that own it, you should also find accreditation from watchdogs, agencies, and other regulatory bodies that audit these sites and make sure they are legal.
Of all the red flags, reports of not letting winners withdraw their money are the biggest. What use is a casino if you can’t make money from it?
Compare With Verified Casinos
If you’re looking for online casinos, you may already play or know about the big casino websites. In that case, check them out, see how glitzy and well-made they are. They spend a lot of money designing the site to look as good as it possibly can, with intuitive user interfaces and a wide selection of games they offer.
Compare these popular, verified sites with the ones you’re unsure about. If it looks rough by comparison and is harder to navigate, maybe it’s not worth your time and money. Is the site updated and maintained? Are links on its pages expired or broken? Don’t doubt the first impression, they can tell you a lot about a website.
Test The Site
You can only research so much. At some point, you need to decide if you’re going to dismiss the site or take the plunge. If you decide on the latter, you should start by testing their games. This is the ultimate sign that you can work with an online casino.
Test free play games to see if they work. If they don’t, leave, simple as that. If they do work, a better test is to part with a small amount of money. Place it into the site and see how they handle it.
Once the money sits in your account, you should try and withdraw it. If you’re worried about giving your email or financial information, you can get a temporary email and find sites that allow payments to be made through online alternatives like PayPal, Wise, or cryptocurrency.
If you can withdraw it, it seems legitimate. If not, get out.
Try To Complain
Legitimate businesses, even ones that are good at their jobs, deal with complaints. Follow up the contact information on the site, if there is any, to find out if they have customer service.
If they don’t, they may not be legitimate. If they do, try to speak to a human and not a programmed response robot. That way, you know there’s somebody behind the site that keeps the lights on and deals with irate gamblers all day.
Conclusion
With all of these tips, you should be able to figure out if the online casino website you’re checking out is legitimate or not. If you have any doubts, you can always fall back on the mainstream casino websites that have too much of a reputation to scam their customer base.
If a site passes these tests with flying colors, you may have found a safe haven for all of your online gambling needs. Note that the site may still engage in scummy practices but, if you know who runs it, you’ll at least know who you have grievances against.