With more of the world going digital, the online gaming industry has been burgeoning: The gaming market size was valued at USD 203.4 billion in 2021, and is poised to grow from USD 230.79 billion in 2022 to USD 492.5 billion by 2030, increasing at a CAGR of 13.4% in the forecast period (2023–2030). (Global gaming market report)

Partly contributing to this growth is the fact newer generations of youngsters are more digitally savvy than their predecessors. According to American research, 91% of male youngsters who were born after the year 2000 play mobile games. As the economy continues to grow, urbanisation and disposable income are driving up demand for activities that help people decompress, such as games.

But this proliferation of online gaming also means fraudsters have more surface area on which to operate. Afterall, 87% of identity fraud happens online (Cifas Fraudscape 2020). This is worrying because there’s little awareness about fraud in the gaming community, leaving a huge gap in the system for fraudsters to exploit. And exploit they do: According to a report by Akamai, a leading cloud services provider, online gaming accounts are targeted by account takeover (ATO) attacks more than any other type of online account, such as ecommerce or social media. One in five online gamers have been hacked in the last year (Kount). These account takeover attacks cost the gaming industry over $1 billion annually (Bureau.id), and it’s only one of the methods used by fraudsters.

Impact of fraud and regulations

Not only does fraud cause distress for users, gaming operators are also affected as fraud can often lead to user attrition. A Kount survey showed one of the top reasons gamers would stop playing a game indefinitely is if their accounts were hacked or stolen.

Unfortunately, fraud is pervasive in the gaming industry. According Arkose labs, in 2021, 27 % of all gaming traffic was malicious. Fraud in online gaming can take several forms; some of the most common are:

These cause significant financial losses for gaming operators. For example, promotion abuse costs gaming operators 15% of their annual gross revenues (GBG). Preventing fraud not only helps curb financial losses, it can also help gaming operators avoid regulatory penalties, safeguard players’ accounts and improve retention.

Gaming operators, apart from ensuring their systems are secure and can detect fraud, also must manage regulatory and compliance expectations. Gaming operators are held to high identification, geolocation and player identification standards as a result of regulations. This becomes a challenge for operators to navigate. For example, in the US, different states have different laws around online gaming. Thus, it becomes mandatory to validate if a player is within the authorized jurisdictional boundary to wager or purchase a lottery, or complete a mobile/online transaction within the gaming app.

Adherence to regulations often requires the gaming provider assess a variety of parameters during a player’s journey: device risk (phone/email), geolocation, ID verification, KYC, affordability checks, etc.  Often, this ends up being a tremendous resource drain for gaming companies as they must build and update their tech-stacks regularly to remain compliant with ever-evolving regulations.

That’s where a seasoned solution provider like TransUnion can help by assisting in managing regulatory and compliance expectations and fraud detection/prevention measures, allowing you to focus on building what matters most — compelling games.

The role of a well-designed onboarding solution

TransUnion Digital Suite is an end-to-end, channel agnostic solution that helps gaming operators acquire new players and ensure ongoing engagement. It’s designed to detect and prevent fraud specific to gaming, such as promotion abuse, whilst helping you manage the regulatory and compliance expectations. It enables you to control who’s allowed on your platform by taking into consideration a host of variables (ID verification, age, location, affordability etc.). Here’s our player onboarding solution at a glance:

Notice how TransUnion Digital Suite manages everything in the user journey from device risk assessment to authentication and access. All this is masterfully packaged into a single API with customisable workflow and orchestration.

TransUnion’s history as a leading credit bureau means it has proprietary data assets — globally as well as locally (per region) — which can be leveraged to ensure strong ID verification and fraud detection. This is done via device authentication and biometric capabilities when a user signs up on a platform, as well as when they return. It’s not sufficient to simply detect the location of the user during onboarding or log in, a continuous assessment of a user’s location whilst engaging with the gaming platform becomes necessary. With anonymizers, proxies and location spoofing, getting the accurate location of the player on a continuous, real-time basis can be tricky.

TransUnion Location Insights uses a combination of IP, device data, GPS, cell ID and Wi-Fi access points to triangulate the user’s precise location — while also allowing you to do periodic location checks which are compared to configurable geofenced zones. This happens not just on an hourly basis but also on a minute-by-minute basis. Use of IP intelligence data plays a crucial role here. For each IP address, Location Insights collects and maintains up to 40 attributes. Its geofencing capabilities include configuring and monitoring virtual perimeters. If a player is detected to be out of a geofence area, the gaming operator can choose to deny a transaction in real time, thereby managing any compliance expectations or preventing any fraud.

Bot detection is also a must-have for gaming operators. Fraudsters can use botnets and zombies to perform distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), steal data or send spam. In such cases, IP reputation becomes necessary to evaluate.

All these have been meticulously designed to help gaming operators provide a superior player experience — one that’s both secure and seamless. It helps increase conversions, retain players, assist in balancing and managing compliance expectations and reduce fraud — which consequently fosters trust and loyalty. Expansion into international markets is also easy as the Digital Suite is available in multiple countries.

For businesses wanting to optimise the entire customer lifecycle from acquisition to onboarding to account management — while balancing compliance expectations and fraud prevention — our solutions and hands-on expertise can give you a more competitive edge. Get in touch to learn how we can help your business thrive in an ever-evolving digital economy. Email: DigitalSuite@transunion.com