Online gambling offers a choice of deposit options

We tend to spend a great deal of time discussing the merits of the various online gambling sites which are now available to the Irish gambling public, but perhaps it is time to take another look at one of the more fundamental decisions relating to online gambling. It doesn’t matter whether you want to play casino games at an online casino gambling site or whether online sports gambling is your main interest, you have to open an account and deposit money into that account before you can proceed. All the online gambling sites offer a wide range of deposit options including credit cards, debit cards and e-wallets. In Ireland, if you have easy access to a Ladbrokes or Paddy Power betting shop you can even arrange to manage your online gambling account using cash. Here at gambling.ie we think that the choice of deposit option is as important as the choice of online gambling site, so let’s look at the alternatives. Many of us automatically reach for a credit card for internet transactions, often for very good reasons, but is a credit card a good way to fund gambling online. Quite apart from the obvious moral question of gambling with borrowed money, there is a more practical reason why using a credit card may not be a good idea and that is the surcharge your bank will almost certainly apply to any transaction relating to gambling. This additional cost could be as high as 2%, and then there are the interest charges on top of that which apply from day 1 because it is a cash transaction. Many people report that similar surcharges are often also applied when using a debit card, so what is the alternative. An e-wallet such as Pay Pal or Neteller is an obvious solution accepted by almost all the online gambling site operators. An e-wallet provides security and much more privacy because neither your bank nor the internet site has total access to your information or what you are doing with your money. How you fund your e-wallet is also far easier and should not incur any surcharges even if you use a credit card, although the interest charges will of course still apply.