Are Online Casinos More Dangerous Than Offline?

As with any new or rapidly growing service, there are often questions around how they compare to older counterparts that had been established for a long time prior and there tend to be very few exceptions – online casinos have certainly been a target for similar discussion with myths and non-truths emerging around different areas in which online casinos operate – some targeted towards whether they’re safe to play, whether or not they’re more addictive, and other such questions too, and it leads to one of the more popular questions around online casino operators as a whole – are they more dangerous to play than their brick-and-mortar counterparts, or are the uncertain questions just par for the course as services have grown so rapidly?

In short, the answer is no, not at all – the various gambling commissions around the world fully support online platforms with many brick and mortar locations having launched their own, and there have been a huge number of independent studies and third-party review sites that look at the biggest online options – all point to the near same certainty that there is no more danger in playing at an online offering than an offline one, so where do the rumours come from? This is where a bit more complexity comes into play.

The early days of online casinos were certainly more of a “wild west”, before the gambling commissions and legislation had the opportunity to catch up there were many individuals or freelancers who took to launching a site and at this time it could readily be described as more dangerous as the protections that are available today weren’t always there, but this is something that was soon resolved and now there are a huge number of methods to determining whether or not a site is officially licensed and safe to play at.

There’s often a nod towards problem players being more common on online platforms too which largely comes from accessibility – if players aren’t required to travel to a physical location to play and can simply do so from their phone, it may lead to longer playing hours – but fears here are also unfounded, as many online casinos these days include features that will prevent players from playing for too long, or add spending caps to an account – this comes alongside similar regulation changes that provide more monitoring here and look to reduce spend for the longer binge sessions.