A recent study conducted from CasExe with over 50 gambling companies found that 94% are regularly struggling to deal with fraud. The survey ran from June-July 2017.

Most of the online gaming business owners are concerned about the phenomenon of bonus hunting, the act of taking advantage of incentives designed to attract new players to a site, in order to gain the most profit from all the promotions available. This type of fraudulent activity was indicated by 85 percent of the operators.

Due to its rapid growth in popularity, fraudsters and cyber criminals are also targeting the online gaming and gambling sector with increasing aggression. Gaming operators are under increasing attack from fraudsters using automated bots and scripts to test the validity of credentials acquired from the dark web.

As gamblers increasingly leverage the ease, flexibility and real-time connectivity of online gaming on connected devices, the onus is on organisations to maintain the integrity of their gaming platform and reduce the risk of fraudulent transactions. This relies on effective and real-time detection of potential problem gamblers and fraudsters as they transact.

Biometric authentication, such as fingerprint, iris, face and voice recogntion as well as behavioural technology is already being used by a number of global banks and this has seen a reduction in fraud levels. Many more banks are rolling out biometric technology to combat fraud, particularly in call centres.

Biometrics, are the unique human factors that relate to an individual and if used in conjunction with other security measures such as device binding, geolocation and liveness detection can prevent fraud happening at the point of entry.

In the past two years, call centre fraud has grown at an alarming rate. Attackers target call centres to gain access to funds, as well as gathering, testing and augmenting personal data to use in future fraud attacks or to sell on the black market. 

The rise in the number of attacks can be traced to a migration of fraudsters to the phone channel, which is the weakest link into an organisation.

Financial institutions in the UK are losing up to £20 million a year through fraud targeted at call centres.

A number of banks have introduced voice recognition software for customers' telephone banking, including HSBC, Santander, Barclays, and digital bank Atom to name but a few. Recently, HSBC said it has seen a significant reduction in fraud, and has proven to be more secure than PINs, passwords and memorable phrases.

Your voice can be analysed in seconds - checking over one hundred behavioural and physical vocal traits, including the size and shape of your mouth, how fast you talk and how you emphasise words.

The USAA, one of the first banks to pioneer with biometrics in 2014 using Daon's biometric solutions recently reported that two million of its own customers have traded passwords for biometric security and there has been near zero incidences of fraud or account takeovers.

So while the introduction of this kind of technology in financial services has been successful in reducing fraud, why hasn't the major gaming and betting operators been quick to adopt this technology too?

The gambling industry has normally been at the forefront of pioneering new innovation and technology but it seems the financial institutions are leading the way with improving the customer experience. Perhaps it is the fact there are too many rules in setting up a secure password. Of course many of us do not make strong passwords because they are easily forgotten. And we can't rely on some organisations because they can be easily hacked. Data breaches are still on the rise no matter how much protection is put in place.

With more security requirements coming in the shape of strong customer authentication in the new EU PSD2 regulations, biometric technology will be playing a crucial role in securing payments. PSD2 comes into force early next year and will affect all kinds of online and mobile transactions.

Bonus abuse, charge-backs, and password re-sets are the typical pain points for all gaming operators. Password re-sets account for up to 35% of calls to the contact centre and not all are genuine!

Gaming operators could go a long way in easing the customer journey and the user experience at the point of log-in by using biometrics as an alternative to user names and passwords. Banks are already offering this as a service. Another area is validating withdrawals by authenticating with a combination of two-factor biometrics in a seamless but secure process. It is as easy as taking a selfie! You become the password!

This digital transformation is moving fast and all e-commerce businesses need to keep pace with these growing trends.