At iovation, we help combat a wide variety of fraud concerns for companies across multiple industries, including many in the online gaming industry. The fact that we work with gaming publishers and providers of massively multiplayer online (MMO) games, however, is surprising to most people. Their first reaction is “Really? What kind of fraud problems do they have?” The answer: “Way more than you might think…”

The gaming industry has been fighting fraud and abuse ever since games went online and it goes way beyond simple payment fraud. Here are a few of the problems we help our customers address:

• Credit card fraud – Using stolen identities and credit card numbers is a problem in the games industry, as it is for any online business. Whether sites support a subscription-based payment model or take micro transactions, finding repeat offenders who use stolen identities and credit information is a huge challenge.
• Account takeover and virtual asset theft – Many online criminals have learned to take advantage of the booming market in virtual goods and currency. One of their standard practices is to steal account credentials and then transfer and sell the virtual goods from the online characters.
• Gold farming – MMO games have resulted in the creation of a whole new industry called Real Money Trading (RMT) that maintains an exchange rate between real currency, like dollars, and game currency, i.e. gold. However, selling game currency for real money is against the terms of service for many online games, and the use of accounts to “farm gold” is strictly forbidden because of its negative impact on game-play and the in-game economy.

In order to effectively combat these types of fraud, online gaming sites need the right tools. The companies we’ve worked with have found that employing device recognition and device reputation makes a big difference. By being able to recognize and re-recognize a device, online sites can track device and account activity and expose the associations between accounts and devices that often help identify organized fraud rings and repeat offenders. By identifying the devices being used to commit these types of fraud, gaming sites can deny entry to fraudsters and ultimately protect the reputation and quality of their games.

For any gaming companies interested in learning more about our device reputation service, we will be at Austin GDC from Sept 15-18. If you are at the show please visit our booth (#304). We’d love to see you.

Tags: Austin GDC, gaming fraud, gold farming, massively multiplayer online games, MMO, RMT

This entry was posted on Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 8:06 am and is filed under Online Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.