Boku Slot Sites

Boku Casinos & Slot Sites

The casino and slot sites listed above are the few that still accept the Boku mobile phone payment method.

1. What is Boku?
2. How to Use Boku To Make A Deposit
3. Advantages of Boku
4. Disadvantages of Boku
5. Safety and Security with Boku
6. Boku and Casino Bonuses
7. Which Slot Sites Accept Boku?
8. Alternatives To Boku
9. The Future of Boku

What is Boku?

Boku is a type of payment method called carrier billing, which charges purchases (or in the case of gambling sites, deposits) to your mobile phone, to be deducted from your PAYG balance or added to your next bill.

Boku’s roots go back to the UK in 2003, when it was a small operation called Vidicom.  Since then this award winning business has had some massive injections of cash from investors and now they are a global company working with over 300 carriers.

Boku’s infrastructure spans several continents and in fact they are the largest independent carrier billing company in the world.  They long ago carved out a niche in the digital marketplace, establishing Boku as a payment method in places such as the Google Play Store and Spotify.  In these cases a Boku payment is being used to pay for a digital product that is downloaded to the phone that pays the bill – an obvious use of the technology.

In recent years Boku have started to move into areas where the product that is being paid for is NOT necessarily anything to do with the phone that pays the bill.  For example, in June 2016 they secured partnerships with the UK carriers O2, Vodafone, EE and 3 to enable carrier billing to be used for the purchase of food and beverages at a number of high profile venues including Lord’s Cricket Ground and the O2.  Online gambling sites fall into this category because although the player CAN play the games or place bets on their phone, they do not HAVE TO use their phone to do so, but can access their account from a variety of devices.  Indeed, it is perfectly possible to use Boku to deposit but only ever play on a desktop device.

How to Use Boku To Make A Deposit

To be able to deposit with Boku is not simply down to whether or not the casino accepts it.  Your mobile phone also has to be on a network that has partnered with Boku and although they do have a deal with all the major UK network operators, there are some resellers such as Tesco Mobile and giffgaff where there have reportedly been issues.

There are also cases of casino operators not accepting Boku payments from some networks.  For example, Grace Media sites used to accept Boku deposits, but not from Vodafone users (they have now stopped accepting it at all).

If you CAN use Boku, the process itself is very simple.  After choosing the amount to deposit and selecting “Pay by mobile” in the cashier area of the bingo site (and note that you don’t have to be accessing this from your phone, it can be from any device) the Boku payment screen appears – and all you have to do is confirm the amount and enter your phone number.  A text message will then be sent to your phone and in order to validate the payment you must reply to it.  A further text confirms the payment has gone through (or notifies any problem).  This process has many advantages:

Advantages of Boku

• There’s no need to remember any passwords or numbers apart from your own phone number
• There’s no need to send any bank account or card details over the internet, just your phone number
• Authorisation is via SMS so you don’t need to worry about insecure wifi or patchy data service
• Payment is authorised from your phone, so unless the phone itself is physically lost or stolen and cracked it is safe from fraud
• There’s no need to have a card or even a bank account as Boku can use PAYG balance which can be topped up using cash

Boku does have its drawbacks, however.

Disadvantages of Boku

• Boku is not really suitable for heavy depositors as there is a daily payments ceiling of £30 and this is per phone number, not per casino.
• Boku cannot be used for withdrawals; if you are lucky enough to win a significant amount not only will you need to specify an alternative payment method (usually bank transfer) but you will also need to give the casino quite a bit more of your personal information to allow them to complete “Know Your Customer” verification and comply with anti money laundering legislation.  You may also need to prove to the casino that the phone bill you charged the Boku deposit to has been paid (so the casino can demonstrate to the regulator that they have taken precautions against players being able to gamble on credit)
• Many sites that let you pay by Boku will charge you a rather hefty fee for using it to make a deposit – Grace Media sites, for instance, charged 15%.

Safety and Security with Boku

The weakest link in the Boku security chain is the physical security of your phone and even if someone did manage to steal your phone and break the lockscreen the most they would be able to charge to Boku in a day is £30 and they wouldn’t be able to take any money from your casino account.  So yeah, pretty secure – provided that you have a lockscreen set on your phone and it doesn’t display the contents of notifications.

Boku and Casino Bonuses

It’s common for casinos to exclude deposits made with e-wallets and prepaid vouchers from bonus offers but Boku is neither of these and is most likely safe from going on the naughty list.  The reason is that there has been some fairly widespread abuse of bonus offers associated with fraudsters depositing with e-wallets and vouchers that have been funded by third parties.  Boku is tied to your phone number which is typically verified by the casino as part of the registration process and because of the low spend limit with Boku there’s little scope for a third party to be involved.

That low spend limit gives rise to another possible problem with bonuses, though – you may not be able to claim the full bonus due to not being able to make a large enough deposit. For example, if the offer is 100% slots bonus up to £100, you aren’t going to be able to claim the full £100 as the biggest Boku deposit you’ll be able to make is £30.

Which Slot Sites Accept Boku?

Unfortunately Boku is nowhere near as widely accepted at UK online casinos as many players would like, especially since Grace Media casinos stopped taking it and Genesis Global exited the UK market.

Alternatives to Boku

Boku is only one of several different mobile phone billing deposit methods and indeed, using a different mobile phone billing deposit method will give you a choice of a lot more casinos.  E-wallet apps are another method of depositing on the go without sending bank or card details over the internet and are only less secure when they don’t have two factor authentication.  With the excellent data connectivity we enjoy in the UK, the main reason why anyone would prefer to use Boku over an e-wallet is not being able to remember the password for the e-wallet.

The Future of Boku

Boku is a very popular deposit method internationally (especially in countries where data service is expensive or patchy) but is relatively primitive and because of the daily limit and inability to process withdrawals it is unlikely to be used by many UK players as their sole payment method.  As far as iGaming goes, its future may be mostly as an auxiliary payment method enabling players to make deposits while out and about without the need to transmit any passwords or financial information over public wi-fi or mobile phone data service. Outside of the world of iGaming, Boku is doing very well indeed as a global provider of subscription services and payment solutions; for example, they recently signed a deal to process payments for Amazon Prime Video subscriptions in a number of South East Asian and African countries.

Surely though there is space for a payment method that combines the simplicity of Boku with the flexibility of an e-wallet and isn’t open to bonus abuse? In other words, a mash-up of the best bits of Paypal, Trustly and Boku? Could Boku be the ones to deliver it?

Last updated: November 16, 2023

Sue Dawson

Head of Content

Sue Dawson has been writing about (and playing) online bingo and slots since 2013, putting her unique spin on everything.  She has written pieces for iGaming industry news sites, appeared on panels at industry events and on podcasts, helped to judge industry awards and is a member of industry think tank Ampersand Plus.

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