We’re of course referring to online casinos. If you’re a player who favors land-based gambling, you can rest assured that all casinos in Sweden are operating under fully legal parameters. It’s much easier for illegitimate online casinos sites to slip under the radar.
Carlos Norberg, chief technology officer at cvasino.se and iGaming industry veteran gives us his top tips for telling if an online casino is fully legit. Read more about him.
Safe Account Registration Requirements
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Account registration is the first action a new customer will take when setting up an online casino account. The connection should be secure and not request any payment details initially.
A legitimate online casino registration process usually involves two stages: registration and verification. Registration is as simple as providing the following details:
- Name
- Date of birth
- Address
- Email address
- Phone number
Once registration is complete, users are free to play games and deposit but will not be able to withdraw their balance. The verification process involves uploading an image of a player’s driving license or passport, once verification has been completed, players are entitled to withdraw funds as and when needed.
Account registration is region-specific, each country having it’s own regulations to adhere to. Sweden has some of the strictest regulations in the world regarding online gambling. It’s worth taking a look at cvasino.se for an extensive list of legitimate Swedish online casinos.
Speedy Payouts
Some players report having Bonafede winnings withheld by unlicensed operators via withdrawal methods that should take around 3-5 working days. While your chosen payment withdrawal times will vary depending on whether you opt for card payments, bank transfers, e-wallets, or cryptos, there should not be any lengthy delays in accessing your balance.
A situation may arise where your winnings will be subject to due diligence checks, usually for large payouts numbering in the thousands. This is a safeguard put in place by the online casino operator to ensure that the payout is justified, legal, and is not fraudulent from an anti-money laundering perspective.
Large deposits will also be monitored, and proof of funds will always be requested by a legitimate casino to ensure that users are playing within their means and their balance is not the product of fraud, terrorist activity or money laundering.
Responsive Customer Support
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An illegitimate online casino will often have little to no customer support. It’s always worthwhile checking that live customer support is enabled, so you can address any concerns and confirm that all service channels are active. If a live chat option is available but not responsive, this is a red flag.
Casinos operating illegally may use chatbots to man live chat options, so if you feel like a machine is answering your query (immediate response timesand inaccurate replies are two signals to keep an eye out for), it’s a sign that you may be on an illegitimate site.
Fair Gaming Policies and Practices
While we all know that you’re not guaranteed a win every time you play at an online casino, your gaming should still be facilitated by a reliable math model in the form of a solid Random Number Generator (RNG). RNGs are there to ensure that your gaming outcomes are completely random and legitimate, and not unfairly skewed in the operator’s favor. Malicious sites will not employ RNGs and will shamelessly tip all games to their advantage.
Return to Player (RTP) is a percentage that is set for each game and defines how much money for each spin of a slot, for example, a player will receive. For example, if a player wagers 100 kr on a game with a 96% RTP, they will receive 96 kr in return. This is a math model that is rarely accurate play-by-play but fulfills itself in the long term.
Good Peer-Reviews
Casino aggregate sites are a superb resource for players researching the legitimacy of online casinos. Most illegal casinos are well-known to the online casino community and are flagged on forums and online noticeboards.
Casino review sites operating in markets such as Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, Finland, Denmark, and Norway will focus on casinos operating in their related region, so ensure to search for site review sites that are targeted at a local audience.
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Gaming Licenses
The most important of all factors is that your chosen online casino holds a license from the relevant authority and one that can be trusted. The main bodies that issue licenses to online casino operators are:
- United Kingdom Gambling Commission
- Malta Gaming Authority
- Alderney Gambling Control Commission
- Curaçao Gaming Control Board
- Cyprus Gaming Commission
Unfortunately, not all gaming licenses are created equally. While the UKGC remains the most stringent and highly regulated gambling board, licenses from both Curaçao Gaming Control Board and Cyprus Gaming Commission have been awarded to casinos that have proven untrustworthy and guilty of fraudulent activity.
Always check that the casino holds a gaming license – ideally from the UKGC, MGA, or AGCC – and that the license is genuine. It’s very easy to put up a UKGC logo onsite without being registered, so make sure that you cross-reference the homepage of the authority that has issued the license.
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An Active Live Casino
Live casino is big business for online casinos and checking if an operator has this vertical is an efficient way to tell if an online casino is to be trusted. While it’s easy to create a digital shopfront for an illegal casino, it’s near impossible, due to the financial resources required, to fake a live casino.
Live casino operators will not affiliate with shady operators.
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Takeaways
If you’re relatively switched on when assessing an online casino, the danger signals are pretty easy to spot. Cheap-looking sites full of poorly designed and minimal pages are a couple of things that should set alarm bells ringing, as are spelling mistakes, poorly constructed sentences, and grammar slips in content.
Evaluating whether the casino is legit often comes down to using your sixth sense – if it feels wrong, it most probably is.
The UKGC license is the gold standard for online casinos. If a casino holds a UKGC license, you can rest assured that it is fully above board. You can check that your casino of choice holds a legitimate license with the UKGC list of licensed operators.
