How best can bingo players deposit and withdraw funds from gaming sites? That is, how can we stay safe and secure when doing this?
Safe, secure banking involves two main factors:
- Good habits for any of your online financial manoeuvres.
- Choosing the right banking methods.
You will, hopefully, need to use both these routes as a player. That’s because in order to collect any of your winnings you will have to provide a bank account to your bingo operator, in which case (1) above applies. Yet for the most part, our concern is simply depositing funds to keep playing (2), which is a repetitive and therefore dangerous.
Most Risk / Least Risk
Topping up your bingo fun money does not have to be dangerous. But, alas, if you’re using a personal credit card (or a business card, for that matter) then you are probably at the most risk through exposure e-criminals.
The fact that you may top up smallish amounts, and therefore more often, makes the situation worse because any would-be hijacker of online information has more opportunities to get you!
So, how do we stay safer? What are the safest ways to deposit and receive funds from bingo sites?
The safest habit to have is very simple: go to a local newsstand and purchase a new cash voucher account (recall names like Neteller, Ukash and others). Use this anonymous account to top up your bingo balance; when you pay with it, the site will not ask you the usual series of personal verification questions — it’s great!
Safe from All Sides
Incidentally, the other nice benefit of using an alternative payment method is that it gives you the power to isolate the money you spend upon bingo from your main capital.
On the one hand, this protects you financially from e-criminals (because they can only tamper with a limited amount of funds in your alternative account). On the other hand, this protects you from You.
You can’t spend more than you’ve budgeted for your bingo (and all those addictive side games like slots and roulette) when you’re only using your alternative side account.
The Receiving End
Now, let’s say you bag a big progressive jackpot! Hey, it happens every day to someone, many people, and it could happen you, too. The problem is that you’ll have to provide a bank account to the bingo site to access in order to wire over your winnings.
Since you must do this, and the information is quite sensitive, and because the online input process will require some triangulated personal verification questions, you’ll have to just be very careful.
Finally, the following are some recommendations we have collected from top banks. Some of them are common sense, but, as technology gets familiar we grow lax, so these things bear repeating.
- Keep your pass-codes to yourself. Don’t be lazy and have others do things for you in online accounts.
- Be super-careful when hoping on public computers, using net cafés and availing yourself to unsecured WiFi zones. Always uncheck the ‘Keep me logged in’-like options at email and other sites.
- Keep your own computer safe with security updates.
- Clear the cache (history) of your Web browser often (same goes for cookies and such).
