Online Poker Account Safety

When you are speaking about online poker with people who don’t know the online poker world usually one of their most common questions is “Is it safe to keep money on online poker account”.

In this poker article we will have a look at how safe it is to keep money on your poker account.

Also we will reveal couple easy ways to improve the safety of your online poker account. From the bottom of this article you can find list of the safe online poker sites.

Online Poker Site Runs with the Money

The first scary scenario associated with losing moneys from your online poker account involves the actual poker site taking your moneys and running away. Through the history of online poker (admittedly quite a short one) there is two cases that we are aware of that online poker site has closed down and players didn’t get their moneys.

In both cases the poker site in question spent lot of money in marketing and promotions. However when they ran out of the moneys to give out in the promotions they began using the funds from player’s accounts, and this, as everybody knows leads to a disaster after a while. How can you avoid poker site running away with your moneys?

First, make sure you play at a poker site that has been around at least 6 months. Secondly make sure the poker sites you play on have the proper gaming licenses. Especially if the poker site has online gaming license from a country that belongs to European Union (such as Malta or Gibraltar) you can be certain that the site has gone through an extensive screening process before they were given the license.

And third if you notice anything suspicious withdraw your moneys immediately. It is a very clear case of “better to be safe than sorry”. Suspicious things might include people complaining about their withdrawals taking much longer than usual or the customer service of the site suddenly getting dramatically worse, and many more.

Someone Hacks Your Online Poker Account

This is the second scary scenario that might lead you to lose the moneys from your poker account. There have been several cases where a poker account of well known online poker account has been hacked and all the moneys have been lost in the poker games or withdrawn to the hackers account.

There is two common ways how your poker account might get hacked. The first one is the obvious: Someone simply guesses your password. To prevent that from happening have a new password on every poker site and don’t have “easy to guess passwords” such as your online poker username backwards.

The second way that your poker account might get hacked is through a virus. Hacker can get a virus on your account that lets him see what keys you hit when you write your password, or he might gain total control of your computer.

The best ways to prevent this from happening are

A) Have a good virus protection and firewall
B) Don’t open/download files that are suspicious.

Some of the poker pros even have separate computers just for online poker to minimize the risk of getting a virus. If you suspect that your online poker account has been hacked immediately contact the customer service of the poker site. All in all it is extremely safe to keep money on your online poker account if you just follow couple simple safety measures.

Safe online poker sites:

Here are the sites that we believe to among the safest online poker sites that you can find.

888 / Pacific Poker

Owned and operated by the London Stock Exchange listed 888 gambling company and licensed inside Europe. Pacific Poker should be one of the safest sites you can find.