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I sometimes have a little fun playing bingo, through an online casino. A few weeks ago I won a fairly decent sum of money (£1509). The casino is now asking for verification details (photocopy of passport, utility bill and front of debit card,) I understand this is commonplace now with online betting so I’m not concerned with the bookmaker, the problem is that they only communicate via email. No other methods of sending information are possible. I have been through this with their support, but I’m getting nowhere.

It’s obviously insecure to send these details through email, but if I obscure some of the information on my card, how risky would this be?

Is there any other technical suggestion that I’m missing?

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Two things I can think of:

I think you can run TLS check against the receiving email domain to verify whether TLS is set up properly on their end. And if you use large mail provider like Gmail you know your side is good. (But I could be wrong in understanding how email TLS works..)

Second thing is you can potentially encrypt the attachment separately, send over email, and somehow communicate with the support the decryption key.

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Well these informations are indeed personal informations, and as such are worth a little care, but they are not secret informations. So my opinion is that sending them in e-mail is not a problem provided the connection to your upstream mail server is secured. Said differently do not do that in plain SMTP mode on a public Wifi!

Once on the first mail server, the information is likely to be sent unencrypted, but it will not be available for script kiddies or normal people. Of course government agencies could spy it, but they already have other means to access that informations if they need them. And once arrived at the casino, you can only rely on their security rules whatever way you used to transfer them, and you really need them to know about your banking informations to be paid.

So my opinion is that the major risk is not the transfert itself, but more the way the casino will take care of your personal informations while used. IMHO, you could try to ask them to delete those information after you have received your money.

TL/DR: IMHO using mail is not a problem here, provided you use an encrypted channel to reach your mail server.

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It sounds to me like they don't like to pay out and this is a scheme that they hatched out to intimidate people. Many people will refuse to give them such info, other will just be intimidated. At the end of the day, they benefit by making it a pain in the *** to get paid.

They certainly don't need all that info.

I would also be concerned because most of these online casinos are run by the mafia.

They are certainly satisfied that you are you when you lose. Your identity is only a concern when you win.

At the end of the day, it is a gamble. IN my opinion they are certainly unscrupulous due to the fact that they have no problems taking your money just paying you. But who knows how deep they are willing to go. You could contact a lawyer and ask them to check up with the business bureau where they are registered to see if there are any registered complaints.

You could also have a lawyer send the info. A little less likely to mess with you.

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    Most casinos in countries where online gambling are regulated are required as part of their licensing requirement to check the identity of players. This is most importantly to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing, and additionally to check if players are in a blacklist or voluntary exclusion list. The exact procedure and the trigger limits before such check happens are different depending on the jurisdiction that the casino operates in and where the players come from, but it's pretty universal. You actually need to be more suspicious with ones that never does any identity checks.
    – Lie Ryan
    Nov 2, 2017 at 10:01
  • The scenario in the question is the legal requirement in the UK
    – schroeder ♦
    Nov 2, 2017 at 16:38

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