How To Protect Your Poker Account: Five Vital Tips

#1 Register With Secured Email & Mobile Number

If you use one email or mobile number for every or many accounts on different websites, apps and services, scammers will gladly (and easily) use information leaks from any of these sites to hack into your other accounts.

So, to protect your poker-related accounts and all others that contain sensitive information, you need to use separate secure emails and mobile numbers.

In the case of emails you have two options:

1. Create a bunch of new email accounts, each with a strong password and use a different one for every account you open.
2. Contact special services, such as Proton Mail or SecMail, to purchase security or encrypted email for sensitive matters.

In any case, don’t forget to use a secure backup email account for all of these addresses and approach any received promotional emails with a grain of salt.

Then again, if you’re looking to go old school with this one, there’s always the option of buying a sole SIM for important registrations and placing it in an old-fashioned mobile phone. Sure, it may look a bit paranoid, but smartphones are much more vulnerable to scams than classic old school models.

#2 Update Strong Password Regularly

We’ve all heard the “use a strong password” mantra more than a few times. But the second part of the saying —”and mandatorily update it on a regular basis” — isn’t as popular for some reason. Still, that doesn’t make it any less important.

Even your strongest password can be broken — so if you do not care to update it often enough, you can find yourself losing credits without understanding how and why. To protect yourself from this cruel fate, you should do three simple things:

1. Update your password every 2-3 months to an absolutely new one.
2. Do not use the save and autofill options on any website ever.
3. Do not keep your passwords in digital form.

If you want to go complete hackerman, you can use password generator services, such as LastPass or 1Password, to generate and keep safe your passwords in encrypted format. With that said, keep in mind that these sites can also be attacked by hackers. 

#3 Always Activate 2FA or MFA 

Any type of factor authentication is good for protection because it requires you to use a third party to receive time-limited codes to confirm a login or other secure actions.

Unfortunately, the devil is always in the details and in this case, it means that you need to use secure and separate devices and email services for two-factor authentication or multi-factor authentication.

Before you activate two-factor or multi-factor authentication in an online poker room, you should also know a few downsides sides of each available methods of 2FA / MFA:

• SMS can unpredictably fail without a way for you to fix it.
• Emails can fail or be hacked without you even knowing.
• Authenticator Apps can lag, slow down or desynchronize with poker rooms’ internal clock. You also can lose access to the device with the app.

In these cases, you need to have a simple and secure backup for 2FA / MFA that gives you a way to log-in without delay and change method.

#4 Do Not Use Poker Account for Savings

Even if you don’t trust crypto blockchains, digital wallets or even brick-and-mortar banks, these places are still safer in terms of savings than a poker room account.

The issues here isn’t just about the basic convenience of money turnover — it’s also about protecting your funds from being stuck in a room’s financial system or becoming unavailable due to a technical issues.

That’s why poker room accounts should only be used for keeping bankroll, and ideally — not in its entirety but just the portion needed for buy-ins in the near future . This also implies that you need to cash out big winnings immediately. 

#5 Keep Your Personal Poker Information In Secret

Finally, one of the best ways to protect your own accounts is to not be a source of leaks by yourself. In translation, you shouldn’t publish any personal info related to your poker account, including:

• Screenshots of your account details and room’s lobby with sensitive information;
• Your username, email and mobile number used for registration and authorization in poker room or on poker website;
• Any financial information (crypto addresses, account numbers, transactional data, etc.).

It is also in your best interests not to use your room’s account to make peer-to-peer transfers with strangers.

While all these tips may seem quite simple at first glance, they can make an impactful difference to your account security. So, as always stay safe at the tables and good luck!