No matter who we are, where we come from and what we work with, most of us have either heard of or used PayPal ourselves. This popular payment method – supported by more than 200 countries and available in a plethora of different currencies – is being frequently used by large corporations and private persons alike. It’s an e-Wallet that allows us to instantaneously send money all over the world making it easy to pay for services we use, products that we purchase and even to enjoy our online gambling habits.
But using this fantastic payment platform isn’t always like a bed of roses. Those who love putting down wagers on competitive video gaming know this all too well as eSports betting with PayPal is quite the love and hate relationship. The eSports industry – which is made up of wide a range of competitive console, computer and mobile games, such as Dota 2, League of Legends and CS:GO – has been rapidly growing the past couple of years.
The huge popularity of not only playing these games ourselves, but watching streams of highly skilled professionals competing against each other for massive prize pools, has resulted in a huge demand of betting on the matches going down. This has opened up a tremendous market for online bookies and a lot of new gambling sites that have eSport enthusiasts as their target audience, such as Betspawn, Buff88 and Arcanebet has launched in recent years.
For thrill seeking video game junkies looking to up their excitement with real money bets this may all sound amazing, but the tragic flip side of the story is that PayPal more often than not isn’t supported by these sites. That’s where the love and hate relationship comes from. Many bettors love the use of PayPal, but hate the fact that the method can’t be used on some of the best gambling sites offering the possibility to bet on competitive video games.
So why is it that PayPal isn’t supported by these sites?
When one of our eSport loving friends informed us about this limitation we were asking this question ourselves. So many other popular payment methods like visa, mastercard and skrill are supported by these sites and even some really unusual ones like bitcoin, so why not PayPal? It took us quite some time of investigation, but then it finally came clear.
The majority of people using PayPal for betting are residing in the UK and these new eSport gambling sites don’t have the authority to operate in Britain. They don’t possess the gambling license which by law is required by the UK gambling commission and therefore they find little use in offering PayPal as an option.
