A painful truth is bubbling under the surface of iGaming’s billion dollar fraud problem which is undermining the industry’s growth. 

Following a rise in fraud activity across the industry, if left unchecked, its alarming figures could continue to rise and operators will continue to lose out. 

Stephanie Trinh, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Sift, told the iGaming Daily podcast how smarter fraud prevention can actually fuel acquisition and retention amid the worrying figures. 

She said: “There’s some stats out there that say 26% of all accounts are actually fraudulent. 

“15% of all annual gross revenue can be attributed to promo abuse. And when you look at the totality of the number, I think there was something floating out there like $1.2 billion and it’s quite a painful thing.”

But how can companies spot fraudulent activity? Trinh then elaborated on the topic by explaining that behaviour signals are one key aspect to identifying such players.

“The key here is that these signals often overlap between what is being seen in fraud departments, what is seen in payment departments, and what is kind of coming down the pipe to the compliance departments. 

“They could be withdrawal times, betting times. These signals are used across the different departments, and they’re behavior signals that give an idea of whether or not this player is trying to game the system one way or the other.”

What the future holds for this rising issue is unclear and one way to combat it is to try and remove the more obvious threats as and when possible but the scale and complexity of the illegal activities are only growing. 

Trinh said: “Two key words in how they’re evolving is complexity and scale. Just the proliferation of new use cases is really going to be the future headwinds that these operators are going to have to face.”

“Fraudsters are going to learn faster how to mimic the behaviour of good players or legitimate players. Two rules of thumb I advise operators on: do your best to catch the lowest hanging fruit, and then triage the bleeding. It’s common sense but really difficult to execute.”