In just over a decade, PayPal has grown from a small company to the largest payment processing venture in the world. Millions of businesses use PayPal to accept payments from customers, from individuals who need a simplified payment solution to some of the largest companies in the online world.
Using PayPal comes with several advantages for both consumers and business owners. For the consumer, PayPal works as a middleman that can protect their personal financial data. Since PayPal can be linked to a credit card or to an existing bank account, users can purchase good and services with money in their existing accounts, while only allowing businesses to see their PayPal account – not their more sensitive credit card or bank account numbers. For businesses, PayPal creates a very simple solution for accepting credit card payments; PayPal handles all the behind-the-scenes work, while the business pays only a modest fee before receiving their payment.
If there’s one downside to PayPal, it’s the number of restrictions they’ve made on various kinds of payments. This has an affect primarily on casino and poker sites, which often can’t use PayPal as a deposit option.
Using PayPal to Fund a Casino Account
If your casino offers PayPal as a funding method, it is a remarkably simple way to move money into your casino account. In your casino’s cashier or banking system, a PayPal option will be listed. This option will give you the opportunity to set how much you’d like to deposit and give the basic details of your PayPal account.
At this point, as with all PayPal purchases, you’ll be taken to PayPal’s site to complete your purchase. Here, you’ll confirm exactly how you’d like to pay for the deposit (either with a PayPal balance you might be carrying, or by using a linked credit card, debit card, or bank account) and that you’d like to make the purchase.
Once you confirm your purchase, the deposit will be processed. In most cases, your money should show up in your casino account in a matter of minutes! This makes PayPal one of the fastest and most reliable ways of funding a casino account.
Casinos Offering PayPal Deposits
Now, here’s the tricky part – not every casino offers PayPal. Clearly, it’s not because they wouldn’t like to; if every casino could take PayPal deposits, then they would, as it would allow almost everyone in the world to easily fund accounts there.
Unfortunately, as we mentioned earlier, PayPal has a number of restrictions in place that make it difficult for casinos to offer customers the option of using it. PayPal has set rules into place for sites if they’d like to take payments through them, and PayPal refuses to work with any site that doesn’t entirely conform to these rules.
As a default, any site that allows players to gamble in just about any capacity is not allowed to utilize PayPal. However, it is possible for a site to gain permission from PayPal, allowing them to accept PayPal payments. To do so, the site must show that they do not offer gambling services in any jurisdiction where it would be against the law to do so. In particular, PayPal has refused to work with gambling sites that do business in the United States. Essentially, a site must both operate from a jurisdiction where operating an online gambling site is legal, and it must only offer services to players in countries that do not have laws restricting online gaming. If a site meets these requirements, they may then seek approval from PayPal to allow deposits through their service.
In practice, this means that most of the sites that accept PayPal deposits are highly-respected European sites that have not attempted to do business in the USA. Many of these sites are those based in the UK that are backed by land-based businesses and have a long history of service, as well.
Summary: PayPal as a Deposit Method
If you’re an American, the bad news is that you’re unlikely to see any sites allowing you to deposit using PayPal in the near future. In fact, even if you do, you should be wary of doing so; since PayPal’s rules specifically prevent such payments from taking place, it’s likely that the site doing so is of questionable integrity at best; in addition, if PayPal realizes what’s going on and shuts down the casino’s account, it’s possible that they might take actions against your account as well.
On the other hand, players from most other countries should be able to find suitable sites that utilize PayPal as a deposit method. If you have a PayPal account and can use it at your favorite casinos and other gambling sites, it may well be the best option available to you; since you can use a single PayPal account at multiple sites, you can make deposits from your bank account or credit card without ever exposing that information to anyone other than PayPal itself. That, combined with the speed of transactions through PayPal, makes it one of the best options available for depositing – as long as it’s an option for you at all!
