iGaming Fraud by Affiliates: Comprehensive Guide for Prevention in 2024
In the rapidly expanding iGaming market, projected to reach $87.91 billion in revenue by 2023, affiliate fraud poses a significant challenge to operators. This insidious issue leads to increased operational costs, financial losses, damage to reputation, legal claims, fines, and potential license suspension.
To address this issue, iGaming operators employ a multi-layered approach that combines advanced technology, thorough vetting processes, continuous monitoring, and collaboration between operators and affiliates.
Advanced Fraud Detection Tools are at the forefront of this strategy. Leveraging sophisticated real-time fraud detection platforms, such as AI-driven analytics and dedicated fraud detection software like Anura or Scaleo, these tools can detect fake leads, click fraud, and abnormal traffic patterns with near-perfect precision.
Comprehensive Affiliate Vetting is another key strategy. Before onboarding affiliates, operators conduct deep background checks, analysing traffic sources, audience legitimacy, and past performance to ensure alignment with program standards and to exclude fraudulent actors.
Continuous Monitoring and Analytics form a critical part of the defence. Ongoing review of affiliate activities for anomalies such as unexpected spikes in traffic, conversions from non-target geographies, or suspicious engagement metrics enables swift identification of fraud attempts.
Education and Collaboration are essential in maintaining a transparent and ethical marketing environment. Building open communication channels with affiliates fosters ethical marketing practices and maintains program integrity.
Integration with Payment and CRM Systems improves operational efficiency and reduces errors that could be exploited by fraudsters. Using affiliate management solutions with seamless integration capabilities ensures smooth transactions and reduces the risk of fraud.
Strict Transaction Controls are another essential measure. Employing measures to prevent fraudulent transactions, including verification procedures and secure payment gateways, reduces the risks of chargebacks from stolen card use, a common fraud tactic.
Identity Verification and Behavioural Analysis are also crucial. Combining KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) protocols with biometrics like facial recognition, and device fingerprinting helps prevent fake account creation and ensures genuine affiliate traffic.
Brand Monitoring is another important aspect of the strategy. Detecting typosquatting and URL hijacking by monitoring brand mentions and suspicious domain registrations prevents credit hijacking from fake affiliates.
Sumsub's iGaming full-cycle verification and fraud prevention solution offers a comprehensive approach to deter gaming-specific fraud, securely onboard new players, utilise non-doc verification and global database verification, set red flags for vulnerable players, verify addresses in any language, and onboard age-verified gamers only.
Affiliate fraud can take various forms, including fake referrals, bot attacks, cookie placing, incentives, brand bidding, URL hijacking, identity fraud, multi-accounting, and unlicensed advertisement.
In the evolving and complex iGaming affiliate ecosystem, these strategies create a layered defence approach tackling affiliate fraud from registration and traffic source verification to transaction security and payout validation. Operators conduct due diligence on affiliates, implement monitoring systems, conduct audits, establish terms and conditions, use fraud detection tools, and collaborate with reputable affiliate networks to ensure the integrity of their marketing channels.
Secure player onboarding is another vital aspect. Sumsub's solution allows iGaming operators to onboard new players from over 220 countries and territories in less than 30 seconds, ensuring a smooth and secure experience for both operators and players.
Sports affiliates can collaborate with iGaming operators to improve their marketing strategies and avoid fraudulent activities. Successfully vetting sports affiliates, as with any other type of affiliate, requires deep background checks, analysis of traffic sources, and past performance.
Inevitably, continuous monitoring and analytics remain crucial in detecting anomalies or suspicious patterns, especially when it comes to sports traffic, such as unusual spikes in gambling activity or conversions from non-sports-related geographies.
