Although the Boku name is not immediately recognisable to the majority of online casino players, it is a company that has been around since 2009 and one that is steadily making a name for itself in the online gambling industry.
If you ask the average gamer to list their favourite casino payment methods, Boku likely won’t make an appearance. Does that mean it’s not on par with the others? Not at all. In fact, while this payment method is not ideal for the majority of players, it’s perfect for a small percentage of gamblers.
To discover whether you’re on that group, and to learn about the best Boku casinos, keep reading.
What is Boku?
Boku began life in the United Kingdom, before spreading across the globe and moving its headquarters to San Francisco. Like many promising online payment services before it, Boku received a wealth of support in the early years, with angel investors dropping millions of dollars into this service and revelling in the growth that it experienced.
By 2017, Boku had listed on the London Stock Exchange (at an initial value of £125 million) and had established itself as a leading force in the online payments industry.
As things stand, Boku is available in a huge number of countries and can be used across a wealth of industries. Not only has it become a popular payment method in the online gambling sector, but it has also been embraced across platforms like Google Play, Apple, PlayStation, Windows, Riot Games, Tencent, and Electronic Arts, acting as a payment option on all of these digital stores.
How Does Boku Work?
Boku is a payment service built for the mobile age. In many ways, it is an innovative and unique service but in others, it borrows from old-school payment methods.
The idea behind Boku is relatively simple. You pay for goods and services using your Boku mobile phone and these are then added to your mobile bill. It has numerous benefits and only a few downsides.
Of course, paying through your phone is nothing new. Anyone who grew up in the mid-to-late 90s will remember a time when accessing the internet meant paying by the minute, with all those charges added to your phone bill. It’s also similar to the premium rate numbers that have existed for years.
The difference is that you’re not paying through the teeth for a service that should be cheap or free, and unlike the aforementioned premium numbers, you’re not being tricked or misled in any way.
How to Play Boku Online Casinos
As you can see, this page is home to a plethora of Boku online casinos. None of these sites are exclusive to this payment method and many of them also accept popular payment services like Bitcoin, credit cards, debit cards, and more.
To play, just click the links and you will be directed to the online casino’s latest bonus selection. From there, you just need to join the site, input any relevant codes (this is often done automatically, providing you visit the site via one of our affiliate links) and make a deposit.
Once you have your account and your bonus is primed, you need to visit the casino’s payment section, which may be listed as “My Account”, “Deposit”, or “Cashier”.
As long as you are playing using your mobile phone, you can deposit just by selecting the “Pay by Mobile” option. You will be asked how much you want to deposit and once you confirm, the money will be in your account.
You will then be charged via your phone bill.
One of the great things about Boku is that it works with most platforms and devices, including Android and iOS. It has less to do with the platform and more to do with your contract. If you have a pay-as-you-go phone without any money on it, you won’t be able to use Boku.
The Pros and Cons of Using Boku
There are a host of great benefits to using Boku as an online casino method. Usually, at this point, we would compare it to another payment option, including the hugely popular Neteller or the somewhat controversial POLi. However, Boku isn’t really like any other options we have reviewed so we won’t go down that route.
What we will do, however, is provide a list of what we think are the pros and cons to using Boku. These are not related to other payment methods, so a pro is not there because it’s better than an alternative and a con is not there because it’s worse.
The canvas is blank and we’re focusing on what Boku has to offer without consideration to what you can get elsewhere.
Pro: Speed
Boku is one of the quickest payment methods around. You don’t need to hunt around for your credit card or debit card and then type out the numbers. You don’t need to sign up for PayPal, Skrill, Neteller, or ecoPayz.
Of course, we’re talking about saving a few seconds, as opposed to hours or days, but when you’re settling down for a quick iGaming session, every little helps.
We all want things quickly these days. If a website doesn’t load instantly, we get frustrated; if a button doesn’t respond to a click straightaway, it’s followed by a succession of frustrated machine-gun taps. Any time you can save a user a few minutes or even a few seconds, you’ll keep those stress and frustration levels to a minimum and that can only be a good thing.
Pro: Convenience
Don’t have a bank account or credit card? With Boku, that doesn’t matter.
In the past, methods like PayPal and prepaid cards were often said to be great alternatives to credit and debit cards, but PayPal requires a bank account and the best prepaid services are the same.
There can also be complications with Boku, as connecting a bank account or credit card is the easiest way to pay your bill and Boku works through that bill. But that’s not the only way to get that bill paid.
More importantly, it means that you don’t need to give your card or bank details to multiple online casinos.
Online gambling sites are very safe these days, but with the prevalence of data leaks and hacks, many players are reluctant to give their details to too many sites. For those players, Boku is ideal.
Con: Safety
This is more of a neutral issue than a con, but it leans slightly toward the negative.
When you use PayPal and similar methods, you have the backing of some of the most advanced security protocols in the world, and these days you are forced to back everything with two-factor authentication.
Boku is also very secure and uses many of the same advanced systems. However, they are only as safe as your connection and your device.
It’s very easy to misplace your device or to connect via an unsecured Wi-Fi network. In doing so, you could be exposing your details to others. It’s difficult for them to use your Boku account to take a lot of money from you, but it’s still a little easier than using a desktop computer to process payments through PayPal and similar services.
Con: Limits
Unsurprisingly, there is a limit to how much you can deposit using mobile payment methods like Boku.
With debit card and credit card casino deposits, some casinos will let you go as high as $20.000, and if you have the money in your bank account and have earned VIP status, you can go even higher.
If you were to do that with a mobile payment service, your network provider would have a heart attack.
As a result, Boku payments are often fixed at just $30 a day, or the equivalent in your chosen currency. The minimum can be as low as $5 but more often than not it’s $10.
This means that you don’t have a lot of room to play with, and that’s bad news for a large number of players.
From our own perspective, we don’t consider ourselves to be high rollers. We like to deposit between $100 and $200 at a time, which lasts for between 1 week or 2. If our only option was to use a payment method that was capped at $30, we’d probably give it a miss altogether.
Of course, if it was $30 or nothing, we’d be less inclined to reject it, but if it was a case of dropping $30 with Boku or spending more time and going to greater effort to use another payment service and deposit $200, we’d opt for the latter.
Many players have the same mindset, which is why this low limit is going to be a major stumbling block for a huge number of people.
Con: Abuse Potential
In some ways, the deposit limits are a good thing.
Deposit methods like Skrill and others that provide a fast and convenient service straddle a very fine line between abuse and ease of use. What we mean by this, is that when you make life easy for a player to deposit large sums of money very quickly, you also make it easy for them to gamble when they’re annoyed, frustrated, and incapable of controlling their emotions.
We can almost feel you rolling your eyes. We get it, we do—we feel the same way. Like many players, we believe that gambling is fun and innocent for the most part and that payment services can’t be held responsible for the actions of players.
However, it feels a little different with Boku. Firstly, Boku is popular with players who don’t have a bank account or credit card and due to the limits, it’s also likely that players who use Boku don’t have access to e-wallets and cryptocurrency options.
Not only that, but it’s much easier to spend money on a contract that you can’t see and won’t get until several weeks down the line. It’s like betting on a credit card, and that’s an activity that has since been banned in the UK.
To top everything off, the fact that they can’t deposit more than €30 a day, and they are not deterred by this, means they probably don’t have a lot of disposable income.
In fact, research suggests that a large number of players who use these services are students. They are of legal age, but they don’t have much in the way of money, and because they haven’t been gambling for a long time, they don’t necessarily have the restraint or the experience, either.
From our own experience, we have been gambling for over 2 decades. In those early years, we were more reckless, more impulsive, and more prone to making mistakes. When those mistakes were made, we tended to get frustrated and to make rash decisions.
Losing €30 in a day may not mean much to us now that we’re older and have a job and a savings account, but back then it was a kick in the teeth and one that meant we had to wave goodbye to a weekend at the pub or that brand-new game we had our eye on.
To stay safe, we recommend that all Boku users, and anyone at risk of problem gambling, set deposit limits separate from the payment method limits.
Boku FAQ's
Summary: The Best Online Casinos
The way we see it, there are three types of people who will benefit from Boku:
- Those who don’t have credit/debit cards and can’t use these methods or e-wallets.
- Those who don’t want to give their card details to online casinos.
- Those who prefer the speed of one-click mobile play over joining payment services like Skrill and Neteller.
It’s not for players who deposit upwards of €100 at a time and you may even struggle with this method if you typically deposit a minimum of €50. It’s also not ideal for desktop players and those who enjoy keeping a bankroll in a single wallet.
It definitely has its uses, though, and we recommend checking it out.
