The general working conditions of online operators cannot be called easy – high competition in the market, constant pressure from regulators in the issues of responsible gaming, anti-money laundering, KYC requirements and other aspects specific to jurisdictions. In addition, they are a constant target of fraudsters from different directions, the most harmful of which is affiliate fraud, as the affiliate marketing market in the gambling business has significantly increased the pace in 2022.
Main types of risks
Since the key goal of an online gambling operator is to attract traffic to its website and to read casino reviews UK, the risks of using affiliates depend on the type of payment offered. Online gambling is especially dependent on this type of marketing, as Google does not always allow advertising gaming sites and online casinos. The most room for manipulation is provided by the CPA payment option – pay per action. Unscrupulous performers in this model can use the generation of fake traffic with the help of stolen confidential information and bots. The latter are quite sophisticated to automatically connect and perform all the steps necessary to get paid. The PPC (pay per click) model is also unreliable. In this case, traffic can be directed to the operator’s website without the user’s consent. There is no shortage of implementation tools – from malicious browser extensions and bots to fake links hidden under images and text displayed by the user’s browser. An online operator can detect poor traffic quality when there is a high bounce rate and KPI decreases. But now bots have become so advanced that they can independently register accounts, make deposits and use free spins and other online casino bonuses. This becomes a transition from affiliate fraud to bonus abuse. The Revenue Share model (or simply revshare) also has vulnerabilities. If a player receives a part of the gambling site’s revenue, it opens the possibility for collusion between players. Big players can unite and make risky bets against the casino. At the same time, their personal losses will be controlled and limited, but the potential loss for the gambling establishment is large – partners need to make considerable payments, while there is almost no income. It is important for operators to remember that under the revshare model, partners will know exactly how to receive their payout, as there is a direct opportunity for fraud and scams. At the same time, there are risks that do not depend on the form of payment for the affiliate program. Among them:
- Using stolen confidential data for lead generation or stolen credit cards to generate deposits.
- Intercepting URL domains that are very similar to the operator’s name or products to receive referral payments via redirect.
- Installing adware or spyware on the device without the user’s consent that automatically captures the affiliate code.
- Copying the content of other affiliate sites to steal traffic.
- Buying Google AdWords for search queries for which the company or its products are already classified.
How can operators protect themselves?
The first of the anti-fraud solutions is high-quality monitoring of traffic on your web resource. With good tools, it will be easy to track the quality of the client brought by the partner. Different solutions, for example, will allow you to separately monitor the traffic that each affiliate brings and have data on conversion or the percentage of approved and canceled client connections. This is a useful option, but how do you collect information to automate customer quality decisions? SEON, a company that provides anti-fraud support for online businesses, recommends enriching the information by taking a fingerprint from the customer’s device. According to the company, fingerprinting will allow you to scan the technical and hardware configuration of the user and determine their relationship using hashes. A hash is an actual user identifier that remains unchanged even after clearing the cache, changing browsers, using incognito mode, emulators and spoofing tools (when one person on the Web is disguised as another by falsifying data). All these tools are often used in practice by bots, so hashes allow you to see whether this is the first time this customer is on the online casino website, how often he changes devices, how suspicious his software is and whether he uses emulators. This method will be effective, especially when combined with checking the IP address, email address, phone number and social network page where the user came from. If the operator has complete data on who his players are, the second stage should be the analysis of their behavior. According to SEON, fraud can be detected by sorting information through “risk rules”. For example, the risk of a client is higher if his email address is from a free domain or if he uses a VPN. Speed checking is also effective – the number of connections per minute or the speed of filling in fields. But this requires high-quality software, preferably based on machine learning, which can filter customers and highlight suspicious moments. At the same time, there are various tools that automatically filter and check traffic. For example, filtering users from VPNs, non-targeted traffic from proxy servers and requests with the same IP address. In general, gambling operators should always pay attention to the quality of their affiliate partner’s work, because the latter can cause large losses. For example, the anti-fraud company CHEQ conducted a joint study with the University of Baltimore to find out the amount of losses from affiliates of fraudsters. According to their data, in 2020 this amount could reach $1.4 billion. And without sufficient attention to this issue, losses will grow, because the coronavirus pandemic has contributed to the global spread of affiliate marketing in new markets, and the online gambling vertical is developing especially rapidly.
