Amex is short for American Express, which is one of the world’s biggest payment and financial services companies.
You can use Amex/American Express at UK online casino sites, but you can’t use all cards. Where you can use American Express cards there are some benefits to cashing in and out with them.
However, there’s a lot of choice in payment methods for UK online casino customers these days and they want to know that the methods they use are fast, secure, and good value.
That’s what we’ll explore in this guide to American Express online casinos.
We’ll tell you what Amex is, how to use it at an online casino, how to find a safe American Express casino, and how to get the best out of your Amex online casino.
Let’s have a look!
Finding American Express Online Casinos
How do you find casino sites that accept American Express?
It’s generally pretty easy to find out which payment methods a site has to offer. Casino sites know that payment methods are an important issue for customers so they put the information very visibly on their front pages. Just scroll down to the bottom of the front page and you’ll usually find a line of logos there.
Below, we list the best Amex online casinos.
What is American Express?
American Express is a massive financial services company, but to most of us who don’t read the business pages every day, it’s a small piece of plastic.
Those pieces of plastic currently come in three flavours: credit cards, charge cards, and prepaid debit cards.
Credit cards we can dispense with fairly quickly here because it is illegal to offer gambling services in return for credit card payments in the UK or to UK-based consumers.
Charge cards are something that American Express has specialised in and they are slightly different to credit cards. They are very like credit cards, but usually do not have a “credit limit” because the card issuer is on the hook for all spending on the card.
The differences between charge cards and credit cards are, to most people, academic, but may be enough to get you around the law against credit card use.
American Express has relatively recently gone into a new market, the prepaid debit card market. Prepaid debit cards are somewhere between a debit card and an e-wallet. Cards can be loaded with a pre-set amount of cash, which can be spent until you’re at zero when you’ll need a new card or you’ll need to reload your card. They are often used as a way of gifting money to young people (no-one under 18 should be gambling in the UK, remember), or as a way of transferring limited amounts of cash, sometimes by government agencies like welfare and benefits departments or tax refunds.
Prepaid debit cards may have a particular utility to gamblers as they are a way to put a hard limit on spending. They may also contribute to problem gambling if they are used in the wrong way and we’ll cover this later in our American Express online casino guide.
How to Use American Express Online Casinos
Using an Amex or American Express card at an online casino is easy.
First of all, you need to register an account. To do that you’ll need to supply some personal details, including your date of birth, but you probably won’t need to prove your identity to a very high standard – this will come later.
Then you can deposit money into your account.
Most sites use a “cashier” page or pop-up. You may simply need to click on a “deposit” button.
The details may differ slightly, but usually, you’ll just need to select the card option, then the American Express option from a drop-down menu.
You’ll need your card number, the name the card is registered in, the expiry date, and the CVV code, which is printed on the strip on the back of the card.
As these payment methods are instantaneous your account should be credited immediately and you can go and play with your money straight away.
Withdrawals with Amex and American Express cards will probably introduce a new process into the procedure.
In order to withdraw money from most casino sites, you need to prove your identity to a higher standard than simply typing your name into a box. This may be triggered by asking for any withdrawal, or it may be triggered only if that withdrawal is over a certain amount.
ID checks are usually completed by scanning and sending copies of documents to the casino site, either by email or via a dedicated document upload page.
Until your ID has been proved, you may find payments to you are set to a “pending” status that can last anything up to a few days. You’ll need to complete the ID approval to end the pending process.
Although this seems like a lot of fuss to go through, it is important to keep the casino site on the right side of the law and the casino industry free of money laundering, identity theft, and other criminal activities. High standards of security and identity processing keep up as all safer.
Withdrawals should then work in a very similar way to deposits: select a cashier, banking, or withdrawal option, select the amount of money you want to withdraw, and then select Amex or American Express from the drop-down menu.
Another way that casinos fight against money laundering is by defaulting payments out of the casino to the same accounts that made the first payments into an account. You should bear this in mind when you set up your accounts.
Using American Express Casinos Safely
You also need to make sure you know how to keep yourself safe in the online gambling world.
This can be divided into two sections:
- Device and online security, and,
- Personally and behavioural security.
You need to keep your device secure and up to date. You also need to get used to good password procedures and the basics of cybersecurity: don’t use shared computers, sign out of accounts when you’re not using them and so on.
Personal security means keeping your gambling in control. This is something to take very seriously. You can’t have been anywhere near the UK online casino world without having come across stories about problem gambling and the terrible effects it can have.
The industry has a responsibility to keep players safe. It must do this by providing access to good quality advice on responsible gambling, and links to support for people who do have problems with their gambling.
They also need to give you some decent advice on monitoring your own behaviour. There will be tools to help you too, including monitoring of your playing time and spending, and ways to lock yourself out of sites if you feel you need to.
Take all these tools seriously and use them. Know what they are and how to use them before you need them. And if you ever feel you are getting in trouble with your gambling then please seek out help as quickly as you can.
Safe American Express Casino Sites
Most online casino players will never come within 1,000 miles of a scam of any sort. The online casino industry is these days very clean and has very high levels of security and safety. However, if you are making any sort of online payment you need to follow basic security procedures, and the casino industry is no exception.
The first thing you should do is make sure that any site you play at is legal and licensed.
In the UK you cannot play at any site that is not licensed by the UK Gambling Commission. This licensing is your first and best defence against illegality.
Please do check the licence, a link to which should be posted on the front page of the casino website.
Some licences do have sanctions recorded against them, but if the site has been allowed to stay in operation then they have been deemed not too serious or been addressed by the site in conjunction with the regulator. The vast majority of these sanctions are to do with poor marketing practices and the handing of players who may have problems with their gambling – something you should also take seriously.
A licenced site should be legitimate, but there’s no harm in going further and really checking out the quality of a site before you sign up. Don’t take the word of a reviewer or a forum and don’t just stop at the front page. A good quality site has nothing to hide and shouldn’t mind you looking around and exploring for yourself.
As well as good design, you should look for the great help and support options (usually live chat, often an email address, and sometimes – and best of all for most players – a Freephone number in the UK). Make sure you know how to reach these options before you sign up.
Of course, you also want a good selection of games, or there’s no point in even looking at a site.
Good information should include good quality content on safe and responsible gambling and ideally on the security and safety measures that the site has in place.
Amex Online Casino Sites Promotions
It is unlikely that you will find specific offers related to American Express cards at any UK online casino site. These cards do sometimes have higher payment limits than other cards, but that is likely to be the extent of any specific advantages to the card at a casino site.
Casino sites, almost without exception, have promotions, bonuses and offers. You should certainly look at the promotions page when you check out a site.
The biggest of these offers will always be a welcome offer. This is designed to entice you to sign up and to start depositing money at a site.
It’s a good idea to do a bit of research on how bonuses work before you start accepting them. They are designed to benefit the site – not the consumer – and they do this by encouraging you to deposit and play with a lot of money quite quickly.
This is achieved with a wagering requirement. A wagering requirement is a multiple of a bonus that you must spend at a site before you can withdraw any of the money you win with a bonus. It is commonly 35-times the amount of the bonus you receive. A quick bit of maths will show you that these offers are not always great value for players. The best way to use welcome offers is to enjoy a bit of a look around – it’s probably safest to forget about the monetary aspect of the offer entirely, and to treat any return from the bonus offer as incidental to enjoying a long relationship with a high-quality site.
American Express Online Casino Payment Details
You should also check out the payment methods page of an online casino site. If it doesn’t have one that is easily accessible then perhaps you should look elsewhere.
Details of payment methods are important for consumers and you shouldn’t have to run around to find them. There are thousands of casino sites out there, but it’s only by shopping around that you get a really good experience.
Payment methods will tell what payment methods are accepted by a site, and should also tell you any charges that are associated with the payment method, and the time taken to process any deposits (almost always instant) and withdrawals (almost never instant) made from or to that payment method.
Weigh them up!
There are usually four types of payment methods in UK sites:
- Banking methods like bank transfers (sometimes through apps) and debit cards.
- E-wallets like Skrill, Neteller, and PayPal.
- Prepaid cards, like prepaid debit cards, and Paysafecard.
- Mobile payment apps, and Apple Pay.
Each has its advantages and disadvantages. Some have low payment limits or take a long time to be processed, some cannot receive withdrawals, there are charges for some.
Harvey Dickenson
Safe Gambling Specialist
Harvey Dickenson is our safe gambling specialist. Harvey is a recreational poker player and an expert in online casino safety, cons, and scams.