Tonight the 2012 ICE Totally Gaming Conference & Exhibition kicked off at 8 Northumberland in London with the Totally Gaming Awards banquet. Celebrity presenter Katie Derham hosted the banquet, which was designed to cover all gaming sectors along with media, marketing, and outstanding contribution awards. The 2012 awards were open to all suppliers and operators in the European gaming market and recognized and rewarded innovation, as well as great products and services from the gaming industry.

Here are some of tonight’s 2012 Totally Gaming Award winners:

• 888.com for Best Online Product of the Year (iovation was a finalist)

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A few week’s back, I wrote how iovation’s fraud prevention service had been named as a finalist for the 2011 Red Herring 100 Global Award. This week we are proud to announce that iovation was named a Top 100 Global Company.

It’s truly an honor to follow in the footsteps of some of the most recognizable technology companies in the world such as Google, YouTube, Skype and eBay, who have all been previously selected to Red Herring’s prestigious Top 100 Global list.

This recognition is a direct result of years of hard work evolving our fraud protection service into a full spectrum device reputation solution that supports native and web integrations for mobile and desktop devices, tagged and tagless device recognition, real-time transparent risk scoring, and on-demand and scheduled reporting. Our remarkable growth is attributed to the collaborative work and effectiveness of our global device intelligence network, which today protects billions of transactions for our clients representing multiple industries around the globe. (more…)

Helping online businesses effectively and efficiently fight online fraud and abuse is our No. 1 goal here at iovation. And according to the team at Red Herring, we have performed exceptionally. For our work in stopping more than 50 million online fraud attempts for our customers this year, we are proud to announce that iovation’s fraud prevention service has been named a finalist for the 2011 Red Herring 100 Global Award.

For the 2011 Global Award, the Red Herring editorial team selected companies demonstrating the most innovative technologies and business models originating from over 1,000 companies from over 40 nations. The companies are judged on a range of qualitative and quantitative metrics, including technology innovation, financial performance, growth criterion, management’s execution standards, potential globalization of the strategy and market share improvement.

The 2011 Global finalists will be featured during the Red Herring event taking place at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza on December 5-7, 2012. iovation’s CEO, Greg Pierson, will be presenting iovation’s winning strategy on Tuesday, December 6th and on the last night of the event, the Global winner will be announced. If you are attending the event and would like to schedule time to chat with Greg Pierson, please email info@iovation.com.

The requirements for making any top business list is revenue growth. The prestigious Inc. 500/5000 is no different. This list considers the percentage of revenue growth over the previous three years to rank the fastest growing private companies in America.

Once again, iovation is proud to be named to Inc. magazine’s 5th annual 500/5000.

Much of our growth in terms of revenue and the size of our fraud-fighting network has been with online banks and credit card issuers. The number of device reputation queries performed by our fraud protection service has grown 938% since 2007, while the number of devices managed in our global device reputation database has increased 2,492% over the same period, reaching more than half a billion devices worldwide.

In the Inc. 5000 ranking, we are the 45th fastest-growing private company in the Portland, Ore. region, and 62nd in U.S. security companies.

As online businesses continue to build safer environments that detect and stop evolving forms of fraud and abuse, our B2B SaaS solution exposes the reputations of all types of Internet-connected devices (desktops, tablets, smartphones) and hidden relationships between devices inside and outside corporate networks. The webs of associations that iovation’s ReputationManager 360 uncovers allows organizations across multiple industries to instantly detect and shut down fraud, abuse and other online crimes before their business and customers are impacted. (more…)

A recent report, published by the Office of Cyber Security & Information Assurance in the Cabinet Office and Detica, on the cost of cyber crime revealed that online crime costs the UK economy £27 billion per year. In the article, “UK Cabinet Office Report: The Cost of Cyber Crime,” UK businesses shell out more than three-quarters of the total annual cybercrime costs at £21 billion, while private citizens (£3.1bn) and the government (£2.2bn) round out the overall economical impact.

The study found that IP theft (£9.2bn) and industrial espionage (£7.6bn), combined, account for over two-thirds of the overall cost to UK businesses per annum. IP theft is largely committed against companies with high volumes of IP or IP that’s easy to hack, while industrial espionage includes stealing or exploiting non-IP data from organizations that depend on large amounts of financial transactions and monetary activities.

Other significant cyber crimes that impact UK businesses include extortion (£2.2bn), direct online theft (£1.3bn), and loss or stolen customer data (£1bn), according to the report.

Because organizations today are becoming increasingly dependent on cyber space for business commerce, communications, and daily operations and production, cyber threats pose a significant threat to individual nations, as well as the global economy. This is why reports like these are so important.

Understanding the economical impact cyber crime can have on businesses, industry, and the economy can play a critical role in setting effective security policies and implementing proactive fraud preventative strategies, such as iovation’s device reputation service, which combats new and evolving forms of cyber crime that have a negative impact on organizations across the globe.

Last night kicked off the Casual Connect Pre-Funk and Badge Pickup Party hosted by Mochi Media at the Fairmont Hotel Ballroom in Seattle.  The event was very well attended and more networking events are happening throughout the week, hosted by EA Partners, OpenFeint, TransGaming,  WildTangent and Corum Group.  The show expects to bring in 2,000 industry professionals for the 6th Casual Connect Seattle to discuss cutting-edge topics in the casual games space.

iovation is a bronze sponsor talking with gaming publishers and payments providers about effective methods for preventing fraud and abuse – such as chargebacks, gold farming and account takeovers.  Organized crime in online gaming is a serious and growing problem.

Many online gaming publishers are stopping fraud with iovation’s ReputationManager 360 fraud prevention and device reputation service.  Customers like Gravity Interactive, Nexon and SG Interactive (previously Ntreev) share fraud and abuse histories within our globally shared knowledge base of more than 650 million devices, keeping their games safe and their players happy. If you are attending the Seattle show, please stop by to see us in Benaroyal Hall, Table 23.

Meet with Cory at iDate West

On June 22-24, the Internet Dating Conference will be taking place in Beverly Hills at the SLS Hotel. The 8th annual show assembles senior dating and social networking executives to network and share best practices.

Attendees will hear from the likes of SpeedDate, Google, Click 2 Asia, Pink Sofa, Match.com, Grindr, DatingHype.com and Mark Brooks of Online Personals Watch.

From anti-fraud experts iovation, Senior Sales Executive Cory Swick will be attending the show. Cory has been a frequent speaker at the Internet Dating events, presenting case studies and leading panels on protecting brand reputation and customers against online scams, predators and spammers.

This year Cory will be talking to online communities about the latest enhancements to iovation’s fraud-fighting service, ReputationManager 360. These recent developments include mobile SDKs (iOS and Android) and a suite of new and updated business rules that offer great flexibility and control over the activity on dating sites.  The sophisticated business rules allow sites to identify specific characteristics or behaviors at the device, account or transaction level. Business rules are combined into rule sets to manage the risk associated with different interactions on the dating site – such as profile creation or payment.

Dating sites configure and weight business rules in various categories to efficiently identify spammers and scammers, including:

• Evidence Rules – Trigger an alert when activity comes from an account or device already associated with fraud such as online scams or financial fraud.
• Geolocation Rules – Trigger an alert when activity is coming from an unauthorized country or through a proxy.
• Velocity Rules – Trigger an alert when thresholds for the number of accounts opened, or the number of devices accessing an account has been exceeded within a certain timeframe. Or perhaps when an account has been accessed by too many countries.

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When talking to people on the street about fraud and abuse in multiplayer online games, they are often surprised that such a thing even exists! But the reality is that once a game reaches a certain level of popularity, it becomes equally attractive to the dark side.

Nexon America is one gaming publisher that takes this threat very seriously! They not only fight fraud and abuse head-on; they take a proactive approach with the assumption that every possible flavor of abuse will be attempted and they’re armed and ready for it.

At a recent fraud prevention user group for iovation’s gaming clients during E3 in Los Angeles, Nexon led discussions on preventing account takeovers, chargebacks and gold farming with other fraud professionals who attended. Gold farming (stealing virtual goods or using stolen credit cards to obtain them) is a serious abuse that destroys in-game economies and contributes to poor player experience. Additional topics that were covered during the iovation user group included friendly fraud, code hacking, password education, blacklists and biometrics, just to name a few. (more…)

Last night kicked off the LOGIN Conference Welcome Reception at the show’s brand new location at Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, Washington.  The Meydenbauer is the second largest convention center in the greater Seattle area and Bellevue is home to online game studios such as Valve, ArenaNet, SOE, Bungie, and others.

LOGIN features two days of online game development lectures, panels, and roundtables, renowned local and international industry speakers, facilitated networking activities, parties, keynote lunches, and an exhibition area. Based on the excitement in the crowd at last night’s Welcome Reception, we’re in for a terrific show this year.  There’s a great lineup of speakers and some really interesting session titles, including:

• Giving Candy to Babies: Ethical Monetization for the Tween Set
• Gamification Will Eat Itself: How Gamification Can Evolve, and Why It Must

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iovation’s Director of Product Management, Andy Mallinger, will be presenting top methods for detecting high risk transactions at the CUTech Spring Forum this Wednesday, May 11th.

CUTech is a credit union technology and research company that brings new technologies and value-added services to the nation’s most progressive credit unions to strengthen their position within the financial services industry.

Financial services is a very important sector for iovation as it has protected over 5 billion transactions worldwide from fraud such as identity theft, credit card fraud, ACH or debit fraud, account takeovers and credit application fraud. As with other financial services customers, credit unions can leverage iovation’s fraud detection service to assess risk in real-time by checking the reputation of the device (computer, tablet or smartphone) being used to interact with the credit union’s website. (more…)

iovation is very excited to participate in the ETA Annual Meeting and Expo, held at the San Diego Convention Center next week. If you are planning to attend, please stop by iovation’s booth #1205 and get your Virtual Crime Fighter t-shirt and hear how we protect financial services businesses from credit card fraud, credit application fraud, account takeovers and other abuses.

ETA will be filled with the latest products and services related to every element of the electronic payments industry, plus all of the major players from around the world including ISOs, processors, financial institutions, value-added resellers and security/encryption services.

Keynotes will be delivered by Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer and Senator Christopher Dodd. Senator Dodd is best known in the electronic payments industry as the former chair of the Senate Banking Committee and, along with Rep. Barney Frank, the principal author of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the law which was the vehicle for the Durbin amendment on debit card fees and created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He also helped write the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which strengthened accounting and management standards for publicly held companies. (more…)

The 8^th Annual InnoTech Oregon Conference takes place tomorrow, April 21^st at the Oregon Convention Center.  Over 1500 business and technology professionals will converge to discuss technology, innovation and marketing topics.  Among the 2011 special events taking place at the show include the 2011 SoMe Awards, 7^th Annual eMarketing Summit, NW CIO Summit, Microsoft Theater and Pavilion and the NW ISSA Security Summit. (more…)