David Morey 
Mobile betting is all the rage these days, with hundreds of advertisements and promotions wherever you go, whether it’s billboards on the highway or ads on your phone or television. While the potential to win big with the tap of a button is incredibly tempting, it’s also a good idea to do adequate research before getting involved with the industry… as is the case any time that money is involved.
Here’s everything you need to know about the mobile betting industry, whether you’re planning on placing sports bets, mobile casino bets, or a little bit of both, so that you know you’re doing so in a way that leaves your financial information safe.
Financial Safety
If you’re planning on placing bets, the first thing you should know is that choosing a reputable, state-licensed gaming site—like ESPN Bet, BetMGM, Caesars, or FanDuel—is crucial for the security of your financial data. These sites go to great lengths to ensure safety and trustworthiness. For those in Arizona, there’s an opportunity to leverage exclusive ESPN Bet promo codes tailored for Arizona bettors. Their reputation is paramount, and sportsbooks with a poor track record won’t retain their customer base.
Most licensed betting operators adhere to the same security standards set by the payment card industry, learning from the best of the best in their efforts to keep customers safe. Similarly, a lot of sites offer financial rewards to anyone who is able to find a loophole in their system, outsourcing security concerns by encouraging legal hackers to throw everything they’ve got at the firewalls in an effort to find and patch potential weaknesses.
Even so, there are some steps you can—and should—take to further ensure your financial safety. Create a unique password that is hard to guess and you don’t share with any other sites, and turn on two factor authentication so that you’ll get notifications and be able to stop any potential breaches. It can be a pain to take these extra preventative steps, sure, but it’s a lot easier than having to recover a hacked account or stolen funds… and it’ll help keep your other accounts safe too.
Protecting Personal Identifiable Information
While it isn’t an aspect of financial safety, per se, protecting personal identifiable information (PII) is another concern that many customers of the gaming industry have, so it’s worth taking a look at how that sensitive data is protected.
PII is anything that can identify a customer, whether it’s their home address, social security number, birth certificate or driver’s license—in short, documents that you do not want to become compromised.
They’re also critical to the function of the gambling industry because of the various rules and regulations from state to state. Betting operators need to prove that you are who you say you are before you start placing bets because of the strict age restrictions on would-be gamblers. Similarly, betting operators need to verify that you’re in the state you say you’re in so that they know no state laws are being broken. For instance, mobile betting is illegal in California, but not Arizona, so Arizona sportsbooks need to make sure they aren’t accidentally taking wagers from someone outside the state borders.
Betting operators ensure this data is safe by using top of the line encryption techniques (again, often ones borrowed from the payment card industry), and they make sure not to hang on it either, cleaning the data from their servers once verification is complete so it won’t be in jeopardy if a potential hack occurs.
General Financial Safety Tips for Bettors
Last but not least, here’s another common safety question for those involved in the betting industry, and everything you need to know about the potential risk involved.
Many newcomers to the world of online bets ask how casino apps ensure parity in their games: if you’re playing poker at a physical casino in front of a live dealer, you, the dealer and the other players involved can all serve as watch dogs of sorts, making sure that the game is played fairly. When the dealer is a computer, that familiar safety net fades.
In order to address this concern, casino platforms do exactly what they do to ensure that one’s financial and personal information are safe from hackers… outsourcing the work to third party auditors who check the random number generators used in the games, proving that they work in a fair manner as advertised. Regular third party audits often come as part and parcel of the operators license process, but even when they don’t, most betting sites conduct them anyway. Customer-business relationships are built on trust, and betting operators know that they need a strong reputation of customer safety to succeed.
