PayPal is the top online payment solution in the world, with both major retailers and small businesses using it to process payments quickly and securely. With such great credentials, it would seem as though PayPal might be the best possible way to fund your online poker account – and at one point, this may have been true. These days, however, there are relatively few sites that still use PayPal as a deposit option.
Top PayPal Poker Sites for Players in United States
NOTE to reader. This depsoit method is unavailable to US poker players. Please check credit card poker rooms for depositing to US poker sites.What Poker Sites take PayPal Deposits?
PayPal used to be a popular method for making deposits into online poker rooms. Since almost everyone who makes purchases online has used PayPal at some point or another, and the brand name is highly trusted by most consumers, poker rooms were more than happy to offer PayPal as a deposit method. However, PayPal eventually changed their policies to disallow many gambling transactions, particularly to sites that operated in countries where these transactions were considered questionably legal (primarily, the United States).
Today, there are only a limited number of poker rooms that accept PayPal as a deposit method. In addition, US players (and some others) cannot use PayPal to fund gambling accounts, even on sites that offer it as a deposit method. With this in mind, while you can certainly consider using PayPal on the sites that accept it, you shouldn’t count on being able to use PayPal to fund your online poker room accounts.
PayPal – In Business a Long Time
The site that would eventually become PayPal began in the late 1990s. Two separate sites – Confinity and X.com – were merged to create PayPal in early 2000. Confinity was a payment and cryptography company, while X.com dealt mainly in financial services.
PayPal began operating in the year 2000, and by 2002, was clearly one of the most valuable financial sites on the Internet, as eBay purchased PayPal that year for $1.5 billion. The site has continued to grow, and now features over 87 million active accounts. PayPal now operates in over 190 different countries, and can be utilized using 24 different currencies.
PayPal’s popularity may stem from its ease of use. Accounts can be linked to bank accounts or credit/debit cards, allowing users to make purchases using either a PayPal balance or funds backed by the credit card or bank account. Payments are generally credited instantly, and since the user does not have to provide financial information directly to each site they are buying from, many feel this is a more secure method of making purchases online.
PayPal also offers a simple and reliable method for small businesses to receive payments from customers. Any user can receive payments from other PayPal users, which can then be transferred to a verified bank account or held in the user’s PayPal balance. Since PayPal has become such a common payment processing method, many larger companies also accept PayPal payments for online purchases as a convenient alternative for consumers. For most transactions, PayPal makes money by charging a small fee to the user receiving a payment, though the individual sending payment can also choose to pay the fee.
