Bonus Hunters and Innovative Approaches: Suppressing Casino Whoring [While Changing Industry Landscape for Better]

The picture is familiar. Some classmates misbehave; in response, the teacher keeps the entire class in for recess or exercise corrective measures to get unruly students under control. It’s an effective and reliable way to manage the class, resulting in settled behavior for the next couple of lessons. The problem? It alienates the majority of well-behaved students. While educator may not hear frustration, to hold everyone accountable on the misconduct of a few creates irritation and dents authority.

The same thing happens in business when manager reprimands the whole department for disruptions of a few; more often than not, it deflates enthusiasm and may reflect on the culture of an organization.

Online gambling is no exception.

Whenever a group of players conducts wrongdoing, the iGaming industry organizations (casinos, national regulators, legislative bodies) frequently react with harsh prejudices. Consequences — bans, more stringent controls or more complex procedures, fines, and anything in between — effect equally all patrons, including those far removed from transgression in question.

The one-size-fits-all approach to total solutions in online gambling challenges has deep roots. The origins lay way back in the formative years of the industry, between 2000 and 2006. Among many other instances to shape such an attitude, one of the most notable was bonus abuse.

See, back in the old days, the rules on bonuses were not too strict. Players exploited attractive casinos’ promotions and played low house edge games like blackjack or craps for free until they’ve completed wagering requirements not even remotely high as today. The remainder of casinos’ money would have been withdrawn, and some players would vanish, never to be seen again.

Money for Nothing and Treats for Free

Exploiting the most common of all — welcome bonus abuse — the entirely new movement, if you will, emerged. Better known as casino whoring, bonus hunting, or any other similar name, it consisted of…

Patrons which made quick money in the long run on free bonuses provided by online casinos.

Hunters played the trump card of bonuses serving the purpose to provide players with means to test waters ahead and, hopefully, get them enamored with casinos’ offerings. Online hubs expected patrons to return once the bonus has been redeemed, but these patrons exercised right to earn free money and to deem experience not good enough to proceed. (You may still find written accounts of older gamblers’ reminiscences online.)

Never an easy prey to no one, online casinos adapted in a revolutionary fashion.

Strict rules were devised to make bonuses more difficult, complex, and intense, regardless of players’ intentions. Wagering requirements became significantly higher. Low house edge games were omitted from promo offerings. Levels of mandatory players’ personal information rose exponentially, both at the time of sign-up and at the time of withdrawal.

Furthermore, habits and patterns of players are today closely monitored by operators. Patrons’ devices are scanned for various data and saved in databases shared by online casinos; they are updated, cross-referenced, and used to identify and suppress bonus abusers. Additional measures may include blocking, suspending or sometimes even terminating players’ account.

Whether you are an honest player or bonus hunter is irrelevant — the initial, preemptive treatment is the same for all.

Transitioning from free promotions to the first line of defense against casino whoring, somewhat treating honest players as collateral damage, welcome bonuses can be nowadays interpreted as, say, disincentive incentive.

When the player is committed to long-term gambling at a good online casino, it will embrace restrictive bonus’ options in order to enjoy later in all perks of well-established hub — certified games, balanced RTP, tested software code, and verified RNG algorithms in a well-run organization from reputable jurisdiction, which ultimately offers fairness, reliability, security, and players’ protection.

But when the player is a bonus hunter, there will be no more free meals during the flight.

Walking the Very Fine Line

To ensure the feasibility of these protective measures and to cover for all conceivable angles of infinite human proclivity explore loopholes, online casinos cover bonuses in Terms and Conditions extensively.

As a mandatory read for any players — with or without bonuses — T&C are of paramount importance for patrons to understand the rules of engagement, to realize how the casino operates and to interpret all gambling conditions, including financial aspects of mutual interactions.

When it comes to (welcome) bonuses, all promotions are by default restricted to one bonus claimed per household. The player’s identity is regularly determined by name, email and IP address, credit card number, hard disk serial number, or combination of those and any additional form of identification casino may require.

While wagering requirements are defined by each promotion, their exact interpretation is in T&C; the same goes for games which can be played to clear them.

The length to which online casinos are willing to go elaborating on bonuses in T&C can be seen in the average word count: a well-run online hub might have anything between 10,000 and 15,000 words. It’s not uncommon to see bonus mentioned up to 70 times compared to word terms cited close to 100 times, and player almost 200 times. So much about the importance of the topic and casinos’ focus on it.

Then, there is an activity called the playing pattern review.

Online hubs use collected data to learn players’ habits, establish patterns, and compare them to determine whether one is abusive or not. So, if your sister doesn’t know you claimed welcome bonus last night and she does the same early next morning from the same household, you’ll probably have some explanations to make (if you get a chance).

The very top layer of the protective pyramid is the manager override clause employed by some online hubs. The final word on abusive-or-not ruling belongs to the manager.

Facing such a multi-level protection system, honest players can easily get caught up in cross-fire and found in no man’s land, particularly considering the emergence of dubious casinos with licenses governed by not reputable jurisdictions.

Blurring Edges

Using numerous opportunities to take advantage of players, dishonest operators exploit bonus abuse protection as the perfect ground to transform hunters all players into prey.

For instance, some casinos flatly omit to mention that patrons cannot double up on video poker with bonus money. The lack of elaboration on all dos and don’ts is intentional; leaving every optional scenario in players’ behavior out of T&C is an opportunity to utilize opaque playing pattern review and manager override clause to their benefits.

Operating from questionable jurisdictions, the system offers a protective umbrella for casinos to romp unhindered through limitless and never-ending disputes with grieving patrons. Bonus hunters or honest players? Irrelevant.

Circumambulating the picture, it is easy to realize…

...the demarcation line between well used, enjoyed and quite abused, exploited bonuses is a very fine one.

While often, though not always, it resides in a gray area, this hazy puzzle can sometimes become blurry and get ugly in a hurry.

To say that the bonus abuse protection system is robust, time-consuming, and prone to misuse, among other things, is probably an understatement.

On the other hand, since players’ appetite to bend rules is insatiable, the bonus abuse increased in the last couple of years, as we’re about to see.

To top it all off, this never-ending game of cat and mouse happens is a $55.83 billion industry based on gross wins, according to H2 Gambling Capital, with projected average six-year growth of 7%. The interest is huge. The expectations are high. To motives are various.

To govern such industry, the focus of well-regulated markets — enjoying the sweeping wave of worldwide legalization in the last couple of years — is on players’ protection, an overall rise of responsibility in gambling, on shielding the minors and improvement of fairness through verifiable practices, as well as on suppression of online frauds, identity thefts, money laundering, malpractices during KYC verification processes, to name only a few.

As we look into the whole picture, it is easy to see that the most important segments of well-governed iGaming industry intersect at casino bonuses; to improve the latter is to run the former properly and vice versa.

Digital Innovations

This circular engagement happens in an online realm relentlessly driven by innovation and technological breakthroughs. We are in the era of remarkable achievements of integrated society but also in times of data hacks, leaks, fake news, and alleged meddling of the elections for the most powerful office in the world.

Not surprisingly, sophisticated solutions came in a software form and provide for much-needed balance.

There are several options casinos can choose from when selecting solutions to deploy, depending on their strategy and policies. The best ones provide for a fine mix of transparency, cost-efficiency, reliability, security, and efficiency in identifying both abusers and honest patrons, and deliver improved players’ experience and boost casinos’ operational excellence.

One of the few to check on all accounts and offer even a bit more comes from iovation — the U.S. based TransUnion Company with offices in Portland and Las Vegas — in form of FraudForce, an automated solution deployed at LeoVegas Casino, a prestigious and reputable online betting venue.

Driven by data from their iGaming industry research conducted among 100 gambling operators which resulted in the analysis of more than 581 million transactions, iovation noticed online casinos’ bonus abuse rose 287% from 2015 to 2018.

Guided by the mission to make the internet a safer place for people to conduct business, they came up with the tailor-made solution for gambling industry helping online casinos to separate abusers from honest players.

In a nutshell, FraudForce recognizes devices instantly (in about 100ms) and accurately by analyzing thousands of attributes; it detects different fraud patterns and stop fraudsters from operating behind anonymity provided by proxy servers, VPNs, virtual machines, emulators, TOR networks, and such; once software recognize suspicious behavior, the device is blocked and taken out of the action.

By following players’ session at the online casino at multiple points, FraudForce enables operators to achieve multiple objectives: it can be used to suppress the account takeover (including frauds and identity thefts), to confirm problem gambling behavioral patterns, and to ensure self-excluders cannot access the website again.

All of these goals are, in effect, oriented towards improving players’ involvement and protection while offering online casinos with a valuable service in distinguishing between cheaters and VIP patrons and being committed to responsible gambling practices.

Good Classmates Can Be Rewarded

FraudForce deployment at LeoVegas was such success against bonus abusers that casino decided to implement it in their sports betting division.

Reflecting on deployment in the case study, Mitchell Willoughby, Risk Control Manager at LeoVegas, said: “Abusive sports bettors basically take the gambling out of gambling. That’s not fair to our honest players, and not the kind of experience we’re interested in providing.”

As is the case with any software solution, in any industry, FraudForce optimized LeoVegas’ business processes, improved their efficiency in addressing bonus abuse challenges, and allowed them to better use their human resources (used to manually check users’ accounts).

In doing so, iovation’s solution does not hinder honest players’ experience.

Since FraudForce “aggregates thousands of permutations of device attributes to instantly identify each visiting device,” patrons don’t have to provide for personally identification information. Moreover, those collected are protected by design and FraudForce is compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation.

Most important of all…

Such a rather innovative approach merges machine learning with devices’ behavior and reputation enabling casinos to “instantly recognize who is an honest player and who is a repeat abuser,” enabling them to “reward good players with a VIP experience while stopping fraudsters cold.”

Which brings us to the beginning of this story…

Not all classmates have to bear the weight of misbehavior of a few. To address bonus abuse properly does not necessarily have to mean everyone should be held responsible.

Using such a balanced approach, any challenge the iGaming industry nowadays face can be met.

Considering the money involved, it just might make the industry significantly more resilient and safer, enabling further growth even more, without any irritation or denting of authority.