There are hundreds of online casinos out there, and each of them has a long list of users with the most popular amongst online players often attracting tens of thousands of players. Among those players, there is undoubtedly a significant number that has wondered from time to time whether they are being cheated. While the answer is invariably that they are not, it does raise another interesting question: is it possible to cheat at an online casino? And if so, how?
Of course, how you answer that depends on what you define as “cheating”. If you think of signing up to earn a bonus, then only playing with the money the casino has given you, as cheating, then yes, a lot of people do that. They don’t tend to make much money, though, because wagering requirements tend to burn through a lot of the money they win. If by cheating you mean using illegal tactics to win – predominantly hacking, we presume – then it’s debatable whether it’s possible. More importantly, there are several good reasons why it’s not even worth trying.
Hacking a casino is illegal – and you will get caught
Stealing from a casino is every bit as difficult as the movies make it look, and there is no reduced degree of difficulty if you want to do it online. Casino sites, for obvious reasons, have some of the most sophisticated security provisions on the internet, and there is no shortcut through them. If you even so much as attempt to hack them, it will take forever and you will be detected. Even in the theoretical case where you did manage to hack through and rewrite the code in their RNG software, it would be immediately obvious that it had happened, and they’d shut it down.
Identity theft is difficult – and easy to prove
One way people try to exploit online gaming casinos is by hacking someone else’s casino account – either by guessing a username and password or by force. They will then seek to drain the account, or to use it to play games and withdraw any winnings they’ve made using someone else’s money. It probably won’t surprise you to know that casino sites log the IPs of their visitors, so they’ll notice any unusual activity very quickly. If you try to play using a VPN or proxy server, you’ll simply be blocked.
Sharing information is not strictly cheating, but it will get you banned
One way in which people seek to game the system in online casinos is by having multiple friends join a poker game and collude to share information. This immediately puts the player with the best hand at an advantage, because they can work with others to make more aggressive bets. It’s not actually cheating, because to win the hand they will still need to legitimately beat a non-colluding player. But it is considered to be against the spirit of the game, and casinos don’t like it. They will detect the irregular betting patterns that collusion inevitably generates, and they’ll ban the accounts concerned. And it’s their casino, so you won’t have any recourse to get yourself unbanned.