What can be done to spot these evasion techniques earlier?
With our device based fraud protection, what we are looking is hundreds of attributes and we are looking into geo-location. We are looking at it from the IP address but also looking at ISP and things like that.
So one of your best bets is being able to see as soon as that device comes onto your site and is trying to get into your server. Signs of evasion could be geo-location, use of proxy, and it could be coming through a VM. Those are all flags which come to us. It could also be that someone is very privacy minded, which is a risk signal to us. We look further into it to determine whether or not it is a legitimate transaction or maybe one an operator should deny.
Now you have collated this information, is there anything which can be done to prevent these evasions happening in the first place?
I don’t think you can prevent evasions; people are going to go and use these services which make them seem anonymous. I think what you can do is keep them out of sight, keep them out of the game. When they see that they are not being successful, they are either going to try and go elsewhere or they are going to stop.
Iovation’s Co-Founder, Jon Karl, said gamblers will go to rather extreme measures to try to get around restrictions to become a customer of a foreign gambling site. Can you explain some of these measures and how they are slipping through the system?
I would say they are not slipping through the system but what we are seeing is people really trying to get through to these foreign betting sites. They know that if they try through their laptop that they are going to get denied. So they try other measures to make it look like they are coming from Europe, for example, where online gambling is legal.
I think as we see the legalisation of sports betting and other types of online gambling in the US, we will see less of these extreme measures.
Why do customers want to bet through European operators? Is it for certain value or is it because they are state restricted, for example?
You hit on it there, it is because they are state restricted and I agree, they definitely do see the value. I think you see with the European operators there’s a diversity of games and that they believe rules may be more relaxed internationally than they are within the US.
Do you think the legalisation of sports betting in more states will help bring an end to this?
We will definitely see some of these evasions come down. It depends on the individuals preferences. If someone is trying to get onto an online casino, I don’t know if the opening of sports betting will alleviate that. It’ll definitely help reduce some of the problems we are currently facing but not all of it.
As operators start coming into the US market and opening up offering sports betting applications, they will have to really think about how they are going to keep players out of the game in states that are restricted. That’s going to become more and more important as they are operating within the US, and being able to control a certain player by geographic boundaries to make sure they are compliant.
