Safe Betting Sites: Your Guide to Secure Online Wagering

How to choose a safe betting site

As is so often the case, when choosing a safe betting site, it isn’t just about taking one factor into consideration, but many. To be sure you’re engaging in safe betting, you want to be playing at a site that ticks as many of these boxes as possible.

Reputation

If a site has been around for 20 years or more, as is the case with the likes of Bet365 or Betfred, then you should be able to trust it. After all, you’re not going to be around for that long if you’ve gained a reputation for fleecing customers and your name keeps popping up surrounded by court cases, fines or other examples of bad PR.

Then again, being an established company doesn’t mean you’ve never been guilty of bad practices. But one-off examples of a customer having a gripe with the way they’ve been treated is one thing and a long-term pattern of this behaviour is another.

A quick Google search about a betting company in terms of it being in the news and why, is a good starting point. Another is to see what customers have to say about their experiences of it on forums or other sites.

Beware the fake review, though. Just as some sites may go out of their way to have lots of positive reviews about them, so other sites may deliberately try to create negative fake reviews of other sites that have done nothing wrong. Unfortunately, there’s no foolproof way of knowing your real reviews from your fake ones.

License

First things first: you should never play at a site that doesn’t have a gambling license at all. That means there’s no control over it whatsoever and is pretty unlikely to be a safe gambling site.

But then again, not all licenses are created equally. There are roughly 10 different betting licenses a betting site can acquire and some mean more than others.

The UK Gambling Commission License and (see below) the Malta Gaming Authority one are generally seen as the hardest to get and the most respectable. So a site having one, or both of those, is a good indication of safe betting.

Having the Curacao or Kahnawake license on the other hand, while better than nothing, isn’t such a good indication the site can be trusted.

Security features

Your personal data falling into the wrong hands can be extremely dangerous so you want to be sure that the betting site has software in place to make sure that third parties can’t get hold of it and use it to at best spam you, or at worst, use your data to access your bank account.

So the site needs to have SSL encryption software that prevents anyone from doing so. If they do have it, it will be advertised somewhere on their site as a certificate or mentioned in their terms and conditions. Or alternatively, as a padlock icon in the URL bar. Reading reviews are another good way of knowing whether the site has all the necessary security features in place.

Anti-fraud measures

This can be divided into two categories. The first is the site itself being defrauded by being the victim of such things as bonus abuse or users benefiting from having multiple accounts. This is more for the site to worry about than you but it could have consequences for you, as well. If a site has been defrauded by professional criminals it could go bankrupt and not be able to pay out to honest customers like yourself.

The second type is fraud that affects you directly such as your money being used for money-laundering or other criminal activities. Unlike some other factors, it’s not so easy to know if a site can be trusted in this regard, or not.

Support

You can tell a lot about a betting site based on their Customer Support service.

If they listen to your queries and solve them in a quick, honest, helpful way, whether it’s to do with making a withdrawal or answering a question based on a settled bet, it’s because they’re doing their job properly. And take safe betting seriously.

If they’re hard to get hold of and make little effort to help you, or do so in an unsatisfactory way, they’re less likely to be trustworthy and more concerned in looking after their own interests.

Clear terms and conditions

Some sites offer bonuses with unreasonable wagering requirements, meaning that a bonus that looks a good offer at first sight may not be so at all once you’ve read the terms and conditions: turning over a bonus 50 times or so is near-on impossible even for the most experienced punters.

Sites with such unfavourable bonuses should be treated with suspicion but worse still are sites whose terms and conditions don’t explain how everything works at all. Transparency in Ts and Cs at least allows you to know what you’re getting yourself into, while vague Ts and Cs don’t. And are a tell-tale sign of a gambling site that’s not safe.

Payment options

There’s probably no such thing as a ‘dodgy payment option’ because they’re all highly regulated by financial institutions.

Then again, well-established payment providers who have been around for years, like VISA and Mastercard debit cards, or e-wallets like PayPal or Skrill, are probably safer than a cryptocurrency that’s only just been created.

As a general rule, the more payment options on offer, the better. A site only offering two or three that aren’t so well-known, begs the question of why that is.

The other thing to look out for are high fees. A few cents per transaction is one thing but higher amounts aren’t a good sign: betting sites shouldn’t be looking to make extra money from your deposits and withdrawals.

Uk regulation

The UK Gambling Commission is responsible for regulating online gambling in the UK in a number of ways.

They’re perhaps the most stringent and thorough betting organisation of all at domestic level and that can only be a good thing for you, the punter.

Here are some of their key responsibilities when it comes to the sites that operate under its license:

• Making sure player funds are kept separately from a site’s business or operating funds.
• Ensuring betting sites have processes in place to stop minors from opening accounts.
• Making sure license holders have measures in place to protect and help players demonstrating problem gambling.
• Checking that the software used to run casino games is fair, safe and works as it should.
• Keeping tabs on marketing offers in that they don’t mislead customers or make promises they don’t intend to keep.
• Ensuring customer complaints are logged and dealt with in an honest and transparent way.
• Allowing customers to escalate complaints against a betting site with IBAS or other regulatory bodies so that the power isn’t all on the side of the betting company.

All these elements are vital in ensuring you’re playing at a safe betting site and betting sites will be aware of all of them.

However, if the site doesn’t have a license at all or holds one of the other licenses (that’s also not the MGA one) then you won’t enjoy the same levels of protection.

Responsible Gambling

Another characteristic of a potentially unsafe site is that it doesn’t take responsible gambling seriously, whether deliberately or otherwise. Here are a few examples.

• Not giving customers the choice to set deposit limits or other limits, such as how much you’re prepared to lose over the course of a day.
• Not giving customers the chance to self-exclude if they feel they need a break from playing or allowing customers to carry on playing after self-excluding.
• Not having links on their site to GAMCARE, Gambler’s Anonymous or other charities that can offer support to problem gamblers.

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