Identity theft. Scams. Spam. Viruses. Worms. Malware. Virtual terrorism. The Internet’s not as safe a place as it used to be – and here you are, thinking not only of signing up with an online casino, but sending them money! What on earth can you do to make sure you’re not giving some lunatic access to your innermost secrets (and hard-earned cash)?
Reputable online casinos go to great lengths to ensure your security. They have to: no one’s going to deposit money with a site that is less than trustworthy. Let’s look at how they lock things down.
As a gamer, you can start by checking the casino’s privacy policy. Thankfully, these long, tortuous documents are becoming shorter, easier to understand and much clearer. The policy lays out exactly what information a site gathers about you when you register: this always includes the information required to pay winnings and to identify you to the casino’s login system.
Normally, gaming sites keep this private information locked away and refuse to share it with anyone. However, some companies use third-party processors for payments, so they need to transfer your details to those organizations. The policy will include details of what’s transferred and how. Bear in mind that most policies allow the site to use your email for their own marketing and to pass your address on to third-party marketers unless you specifically opt out.
In the real world, your data sits on a disk inside a server, inside an ISP’s building. That server is protected by building security and also virtual security such as firewalls, which stop unauthorized connections (from hackers and the like). Any ISP worth its salt has failover systems and detection devices to trap attacks, viruses and all the other virtual nasties before they do any harm.
The casino companies and ISPs also have strict policies that prevent their staff from seeing anything but a bare minimum of their clients’ data. People get fired for peeping inside databases without appropriate reason and it’s unlikely that more one than or two trusted individuals have access to all your information. Each department only sees the essentials that allow the staff to do their job.
When it comes to your money, reputable sites use accepted standards for online payments. These include 128-bit SSL encryption (which is the best available outside military applications) and trust certificates. The encryption is standard across the board and you should never trust a site that doesn’t use it. The certificates – from VeriSign or Thawte – are less common, but add another level of trust to all communications. They provide a guarantee that your data will be transferred safely and online gamers should favor these sites above others.
There’s one other aspect of security that is sometimes overlooked: audit trails. All reputable casinos provide facilities to look back over months of gambling, to see exactly what happened at any given time. This is an essential feature for peace of mind as a player – if there’s ever a dispute over a win or a payment, the audit trail will show events blow by blow and can even be supplied to an independent, third-party mediator to resolve the dispute.
