How can fraud and other issues be combated online?

Despite previous cheating issues in iGaming, it is easier to detect nefarious game security and financial fraud activities than in similar gaming at the brick and mortar level. With the ability to record every single hand played, and what each player’s hole cards were, along with having the digital footprint of every account on a site, it quickly becomes apparent that iGaming & iPoker cheating detection has a big leg up on in-person gaming. Data analysis is much easier, with having hundreds-millions of hands and data points on each player. Restrictions on accounts and cashouts can quickly be put in place should a player/group be suspected of cheating, allowing a full review to take place. Unfortunately, many operators fail to develop anti-fraud & anti-cheating systems when building gaming platforms. Developing such functions can be harder and more complicated to implement after launch, but it is absolutely possible. There are several areas where operators should protect themselves and their players.

1. Compromised Accounts
2. Player Collusion
3. Multi-Accounting/Account Sharing
4. Bots
5. Deposit Fraud
6. Player Fraud (promo, deposit bonus, affiliate & rakeback abuse)
7. Fraudulent Chip Dumping
8. Responsible Gaming

If the above is ignored, it can cost operators profit both directly and indirectly. Directly where the site ends up paying for something (eg a collusion refund) out of pocket and indirectly due to players leaving the site over trust issues.

We are sometimes asked “Do we require an expert to watch the all tables/games 24/7 for cheating”. The simple answer to this is no. It would be very expensive, as several people would need to be hired for around the clock monitoring. iGamingOps.com also believe this to be far less useful than an automated system, which would have one or two people reviewing – this number could grow depending on workload. A human, or several, manually monitoring a site 24/7 would not pick up too much with regards to game security, it would be slightly more useful from the financial fraud aspect. Cashouts should be manually approved for maximum protection, basically verifying that the funds have come from legitimate gameplay as well as deposit methods. Rules can be introduced to allow trusted players to receive their cashout right away, maybe up to a certain amount of dollars or a certain amount of times, before they are manually looked at.

Firstly, what would be advised, is that your site develops game security and financial fraud detection systems, tools, alerts & reports, which we can advise on, design & test. There is a huge amount that can be done to proactively prevent fraud and then reactively detect issues that have occurred. It fully depends on budget and how much time your dev team has.

Secondly, it is very feasible for us to then carry out reviews on what these systems pick up, along with reviewing player identified issues (where a player would contact the site directly, asking to look at some opponents).

Having vast experience with all areas mentioned above, we believe that iGamingOps.com can greatly help your site, should we work together. Having helped many sites previously prevent and detect abuse, gives us invaluable insight on what systems should be put in place. Please note that no site/tool/person is bullet proof, and game security & fraud issues will always occur where there is money involved, same as the real world. Ourselves and no-one else, can truthfully guarantee that they can make you “fraud free” but we can help you get close to it.