The Importance of Staying Safe In Online Casinos

We’ve all groaned, moaned and chuckled through health and safety classes at high school. “Remember to put the thing on the thing before doing the thing so you don’t end up with a thing in your thing” and other types of cringeworthy warnings have echoed in classrooms throughout the civilized world and have subsequently been completely ignored. Because at the end of the day, we don’t want to be lectured on stuff like safety, we know this stuff perfectly ourselves, don’t we? We’re adults, goddammit, the last thing we need is someone telling us how to stay safe! We know how to stay safe, hell, it’s in our very DNA! Only an idiot wouldn’t know how to stay safe, right? Well… We all say that, but at the end of the day, thanks to stuff like constant, boring, even downright deprecating health and safety warnings in high schools, the teenage pregnancy rates have dropped significantly. Same goes for stuff like STDs, scams, drug abuse… Hell, even violent crimes have decreased by a significant percentage because people know how to protect themselves from them now. Safety warnings, as annoying and condescending as they are, actually work.

The same goes for online casinos. Sure, nobody actually <i>wants</i> to sit down and read up on how to find a safe online casino, because “Only dumb people get scammed”, “If it’s in Google it’s got to be legitimate” and “This kind of thing would never happen to me”, but honestly, the more I researched this subject before diving into my own online casino adventure, the more I realized that finding a safe online casino is far from the clear cut most people expect it to be. Fraudulent casinos are everywhere, since they’re super easy to produce en masse, super cheap to maintain and even if they’re taken down, they can always pop up again. And if you play in an unsafe, unregulated online casino? Best case scenario, you’ll lose all the money you invest into it. I’m not saying that all the games are necessarily rigged to always make you win, quite the opposite – in fact, many of the games might actually have better odds than average! However, once it’s actually time for the casino to pay up your winnings, there will be delays in the deposit, or a convenient bank error, or worst of all, a “deposit fee” asking you to pay a certain sum in order to get you’re your money transferred. Worst case scenario, you could even go to prison!

So yeah, I don’t think I need to tell you that making sure the casino you’re playing at is legitimate is pretty important. But how do you check? Honestly, it’s a lot easier than you might think, and it only takes a couple of seconds as long as you know what you’re looking for. I mean, if I – who had never in her life touched an online casino until just very recently – could learn how to do it, then you absolutely can too! While the method for verifying sites is different in every country, you mostly need to be looking out for certificates. A good online casino will be certified by the government (such as the Gambling Commission in the UK) and will proudly display that certificate in its footer. Additionally, you should be able to look up said certificate from the Gambling Commission’s site. The best online casinos in the UK are also certified by independent organizations such as eCOGRA, which run tests on the games to make sure they’re not hogging all your hard-earned money! While it always helps to do a little bit of research and figure out what you need to be looking for, if you don’t want to do that, you can always check out some safe online gambling sites which have already been verified by people way smarter than you and I!

So the bottom line is, as annoying as the constant reminders to stay safe are, they serve a purpose and remind you that there’s a reason for their existence. In the casino world, scammers are everywhere, but the good news is that you really don’t need to do all that much to avoid them. Just be vigilant, look out for those certificates, make sure they’re legit and have fun!