When gambling online for real money, you need to make a deposit at the online casino or sportsbook. You can play some casino games for free as a demo but if you want the thrill of playing for real money, you must deposit funds at the online casino.
That means choosing a payment method from those available at your gambling website or app of choice. All payment methods offered by fully licensed online gambling sites come with their own security to keep your money safe but what can you do to increase your online payments security?
SSL Encryption
Checking for SSL encryption is perhaps the easiest security measure you can take when making payments online. If you look at the beginning of the website URL in the address bar of your internet browser, you should see a small padlock icon. You can click on the padlock icon and this will allow you to view the connection security. You will be able to see if the website has a valid certificate from a trusted authority. By having a valid certificate, it means any financial information sent to the website will be secure and cannot be intercepted. In many cases, the information is changed to a code and that code alone is no use to anyone.
Check Your Financial Statements
The best way to see if there has been any suspicious activity on your account having made a payment online, such as a gambling deposit, is to regularly check your financial statements.
It is possible to check bank statements online and many people now choose to do all their banking using a mobile application. You can quickly login to your financial accounts and view all the transactions from your account. You know where and when you have spent money and how much money you have spent when paying for entertainment online. If there is a payment you do not recognize, you can immediately contact your bank and ask them to check the payment details. Usually, a bank will quickly recognize if there has been suspicious activity and will block the payment method being used until you confirm if the payment was made by you or if it was fraudulent. However, it is wise to take a few seconds out of each day to quickly check your financial statements.
Two-Factor Authentication
Two-factor authentication has become one of the best ways to protect accounts online. It does not matter if it is an email account, Amazon account, eBay account, or online gambling account, if you have the option to turn on two-factor authentication, you should aways use it.
The beauty of two-factor authentication is that if your password gets stolen and someone tries to login to your account, it will ask for a further form of authentication. This is usually a code that is sent to the mobile phone of the account holder. So, unless the hacker has both your password and mobile phone, which is highly unlikely, they will not gain access to your account. For those who like to gamble online, you could have an account with funds and you do not want a hacker entering your account and stealing the money. There are several mobile casinos available in NJ that have two-factor authentication and it is a great way to increase online payments security.
Never Use the Same Password
It is extremely tempting to use the same password for every online account you create. This is based solely on convenience because it is easier to remember just one password than it is to remember ten different passwords. However, if a criminal gets hold of your password for one account, they will immediately try and use it for all your other accounts and within a matter of minutes, they have access to multiple online accounts. Even when you have set up two-factor authentication, you should never reuse the same password because it only encourages hackers to keep trying to steal account information.
So, there are several things you can do to increase your online payments security. They are all straightforward and take only a matter of minutes to complete. Just one of them could be the difference between keeping your finances safe and having your details stolen.
