Paypal Slots Sites

Paypal Slots

1. What is Paypal?
2. Advantages of Paypal
3. Disadvantages of Paypal
4. The Future of Paypal Slots

What is Paypal?

Paypal is an e-wallet system which is particularly popular with UK slot players, especially those who have never played slots online before as a great many of them already have a Paypal account for historical reasons.

Paypal’s roots go all the way back to 1998 and from 2002 until 2014 it was a subsidiary of eBay where it was the default payment method.  If you bought or sold on eBay during the noughties, you almost certainly have a Paypal account – along with 218 million others across 202 markets and 25 currencies.  Paypal added a layer of trust to eBay transactions, protecting purchasers in the event of non delivery or of items not being as described, and making it unnecessary for vendors to share their bank account details.  The safety, security and convenience that made Paypal so ubiquitous are still major plus points of the platform today.

The UK is one of only a very few countries where Paypal can be used to fund slots play.  This is because Paypal have high standards or trust and safety and only support payments to and from online gambling sites in fully regulated environments.

Advantages of Paypal

Here are some of the ways that Paypal’s safety, security and convenience benefit online slots players in the UK (and indeed in the other, mostly European, countries where it is accepted):

• Several different cards can be linked to one Paypal account and the player only needs to remember one password.
• The player does not need to have their card with them/remember the CVC number in order to make a deposit.
• If a card is replaced by one with a different number after being lost or stolen there’s no hassle with the casino only wanting to send withdrawals to the same number card as was used to make the original deposit.
• The casino never gets to see the card details, but if you fund via a linked card the card issuer will see where the money is going and alert you to any suspicious transactions.
• Paypal has iOS and Android apps for secure payments on the move
• Paypal can be used without a card at all – the account can be funded directly from a bank account (or by selling things on eBay).
• Transactions can be checked at any time
• Paypal can be used for withdrawals as well as for deposits.  You can withdraw your winnings to Paypal then use the money elsewhere without ever transferring it to your bank account.  That’s the advantage of an e-wallet over prepaid vouchers, mobile phone billing and other alternative deposit methods.
• Paypal is widely accepted outside the world of iGaming and this means if you get lucky you can easily spend the cash on goods or services that are nothing to do with online gambling.

Disadvantages of Paypal

On the minus side, there are a few potential pitfalls that Paypal users need to be aware of.

• For a Paypal account to be acceptable as a payment method, it will normally need to be associated with the same email address as your casino account .  Most of us have more than one email address, so this could be an issue if you want to use Paypal to make a deposit later on and didn’t think about that when you first signed up to play slots.
• Quite a lot of UK slot sites these days accept Paypal, but exclude deposits made with Paypal from any bonus offers.  The reason for this is that a couple of years ago, there was widespread, organised abuse of casino welcome offers using a different e-wallet, Skrill.  They exploited the facility to send money to or from an e-wallet via an account that belongs to someone else.   Most casinos have responded to this by applying additional rules (such as a very low stake size) to Skrill players, excluding them from offers or by stopping accepting Skrill altogether, but some have gone even further and excluded all e-wallets from their welcome offer.
• The biggest disadvantage of Paypal is actually nothing to do with the product itself – it is the ongoing onslaught of Paypal related phishing scams.  This is when you receive an email saying there is an irregularity with your account and inviting you to login to view transactions.  The email includes a link which appears to be to Paypal, but actually goes to a fake Paypal login page – the object being to capture your login details and hijack the account.  Paypal do send out genuine emails from time to time reminding account holders that they can view recent transactions, and some of the phishing emails can be rather authentic looking and thus trap the unwary.  The safest strategy is never to click on a link in an email to log in, but always navigate independently to the Paypal site to log in and check your account just in case even if you think the email is definitely from Paypal.

The Future of Paypal Slots

The future has been looking a bit shaky for Paypal as a deposit method at slot sites in the UK ever since the run up to April 2020 when the Gambling Commission banned the use of credit cards for gambling transactions.  This meant that Paypal had to come up with a solution to prevent the use of credit cards to fund Paypal deposits by UK players.  They duly did so, and if you’ve made a deposit at a gambling site with Paypal since then you’ll have found that if you don’t already have the funds in the e-wallet, you can only pull them direct from your bank account or via a debit card, not via a credit card.

Nevertheless some big operators – Gamesys for example – have phased out Paypal altogether or at least only allow players who opened their account prior to April 2020 to use it.

An obvious reason for this is not wanting the hassle of

1. making it harder to validate player accounts (because there’s no debit card details)
2. policing whether a credit card might have been involved at some stage (the operator, as well as the payment processor, is responsible for this).

There’s more to it than that, though, and it’s connected with WHY the Gambling Commission banned players from depositing with credit cards.  AFFORDABILITY is the issue and you’re going to be hearing that word a lot in relation to UK players over the next couple of years.  The Gambling Commission (and the UK government) do not want anyone to be given the opportunity to gamble with money they can’t afford to lose and the credit card ban started that particular ball rolling as it makes it MUCH harder for people to gamble with borrowed money.

The trouble is, a player who deposits and withdraws with Paypal could easily be covering up financial problems.  They can pay into Paypal (or even have a third party pay into their Paypal) in order to be able to make deposits and they can also spend any winnings independently of their bank account – which, meanwhile, could be seriously in the red.

The opacity of Paypal, then, can impede operators’ affordability checks.

Players would no doubt see that as an advantage, because intrusive checks by operators are never going to be welcomed.  But for operators, it’s a different story as they are already obliged to carry out some affordability checks on players and it’s only going to get more rigorous.  There’s lots of talk of using Open Banking technology to query player bank accounts directly, but what if the player either doesn’t have a bank account or doesn’t use it for discretionary spending?

The question is, as affordability check requirements become more onerous, will operators still want or need players who are unwilling or unable to deposit with methods other than Paypal?

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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