With the online casino scene in New Jersey exploding in the last 8 years, it has become even more important to be able to separate the accredited sites from the scams.

There are a few things that all major illegal casinos have in common — things that you can look out for to determine if you should give a new casino your hard-earned money. Here’s a short guide to a few of the major red flags when you’re looking at online casinos in New Jersey.

Research Its License

Research is going to be a theme of this list. To determine an NJ online casino’s accreditation, you have to look at its records. That means figuring out if it has a proper operating license.

Since there are judiciaries in every state (DGE for New Jersey) that provide these licenses, no legal online casino will operate without one. It’s the first line of defense against scams and how you, the player, can separate the legitimate casino experiences from the illegitimate.

You may be wondering how you go about checking an online casino’s license. Simply visit the casino’s home page and scroll to the bottom; you’re looking for some kind of byline or seal acknowledging the business’s accreditation. That should tell you who licensed the business as a legal casino after checking out its software, payment processes, and other functions to ensure that it’s a legal and legit operation.

However, scams can be pretty crafty. Even if you see what looks like a seal of a licensor’s approval, that could always be fabricated. You may need to check out the company listed there, as well. If you’re playing in New Jersey or another US online casino, the operator will have a license confirmed by the Kahnawake Gaming Commission.

Not in New Jersey: In Europe, Malta and Gibraltar contain the largest gaming certification divisions. Countries in the Caribbean have accredited licensors, as well.

If you don’t see anything that matches this information or can’t find a prominent sign of the casino being licensed at all, you may want to reconsider creating a player account with that particular online casino.

Testing Certificate

Another qualification for an online casino that you can check is its testing certification. Every accredited gambling site has had its software tested for fairness by a major testing service like eCOGRA or iGaming Labs.

These companies audit the gambling software to ensure that the RTP percentages are presented fairly and accurately and that the software itself operates on true rules of random chance that give players authentic, fair gaming experiences. For example, a slot game might have an RTP of 96% which means that 96% of the time, the player will win their wager or more when playing that slot. This percentage is usually calculated over a million spins, so the technology measuring will calculate its RTP with some level of variance to determine if it is within a fair range from its marketed RTP.

You don’t have to wonder where to look for the labels or badges that show this certification because the sites that have undergone the proper fairness testing want you to know about it. If the gaming site you’re looking at doesn’t have prominent certification displayed about its successful fairness testing and which accredited auditing company did the testing, then you may want to reconsider playing there.

Certification is a selling point and NJ online casinos know it. You should be suspicious if you can’t find evidence of testing or if the alleged company that performed the test doesn’t have a lot of online records.

Scandals

If an online casino is illegal, even if it has only been around for a short time, people probably will have already run into trouble with that casino. Illegal casinos will quickly get outed online and may even run into public legal troubles.

These issues include failure or refusal to pay winnings, bad customer support infrastructure, and unfair gameplay. When this happens, customers will start complaining and back it up with legal action. A quick Google search should suffice to tell you if any of this has been going on with the casino you’re considering.

You’ll know right away when you see the news articles about scandals or the Reddit/gamer forums talking about people’s unfair experiences at the casino. With just a little digging, it shouldn’t be difficult to weed out the illegal outfits from the legitimate sites.

Design

This aspect is a little subjective. One of the quickest ways to find out if an online casino is illegal is to just look at its interface. Especially for experienced gamers, it’s often easy to tell when a site has been slapped together and was never intended to be a quality gaming platform.

Things like the layout of the icons, the design of the text and links, and the overall structure of the interface could give off an appearance of cheap or under-designed programming. Of course, this doesn’t automatically make the site a scam, but low design standards are something that a lot of scam sites do have in common.

Regardless of its legal standing, if you feel like a site isn’t clean or put together well, you should avoid it. Ultimately, you want a good player-experience, and if you get a bad first impress — don’t commit to that casino.

Design means more than simply the layout and art style of the site, however. There are many standard features that you should look for to make sure a gambling site is legitimate. For instance, one of the easiest to notice is whether its URL has “https://” at the beginning, which indicates a secure site that will protect your personal data.

Other things to watch for include dedicated pages for standard site functions like “Terms and Conditions,” “About Us,” and “Privacy Policy.” These, along with labels on the site that show its certifications, that it operates on a secure connection, and that it has a well-known gaming software designer can help you figure out if the site is legit or not.

The Takeaway

Scams are prevalent in any industry, but especially online gambling. Thankfully, it’s not difficult to spot some tell-tale signs of an illegitimate site simply by looking at it. Real sites not only advertise their accreditation and testing certifications but also have a design that follows the basic safety structure of a real site.

Look for dedicated pages about the company, the symbol for a secure connection in your URL bar, and the companies that certified and designed the site. Without any or all of these basic security design features, you may be looking at a scam.