Since our inception, the online gaming industry has been a very important sector for us. This is why I am so excited that iovation’s ReputationManager 360 has been awarded Casino Journal’s Top 20 Most Innovative Technologies in Gaming Award, which recognizes outstanding fraud prevention services helping international online gaming companies stop fraud and abuse.

With criminals targeting online casinos around the clock (we’ve got the data to prove it!), gaming sites need all the help they can get to rid their tables of costly criminal activity such as credit card fraud, chargebacks, account takeover and player collusion. Leveraging iovation’s global database of over 600 million unique devices, our gaming customers gain deep insight into every device, whether it’s a PC, smartphone or tablet, attempting to login or play on their site. Using customizable business rules that allow them to assess risk at various integration points, online gaming providers will spot characteristics that are consistent with fraud and abuse to stop criminals before they strike. (more…)

If you’re curious to know what’s topping people’s wish lists this holiday season, just take a look at online sales. No big surprise, electronics are where it’s at. Based on information provided by fraud prevention experts (and iovation partner) Retail Decisions (ReD), the top-ten list of products sold online during Black Friday was dominated by GPS systems, televisions, digital cameras and video game consoles.

Besides providing statistics on what online purchases people were spending their hard-earned money on during Black Friday, ReD also noted that online criminals were out in force, busy spending other people’s money. “Whilst online retailers witnessed a huge upturn in sales this Black Friday, fraudsters are also ‘spending’ more, with an average value of $248 per transaction online, 23% more than the average genuine customer,” said ReD’s CEO, Carl Clump. (more…)

This week the U.S. House of Representatives is debating over whether online gambling should be regulated or simply prohibited. At the same time, the recent release of a study, commissioned by WiredSafety and conducted by Harvard professor Malcolm Sparrow, asserts that regulation, and not prohibition, would best mitigate the risks posed by online gambling. This line of thinking may be in part why implementation of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) has been delayed, and why many are now discussing a separate bill, H.R. 2267, the Internet Gambling Regulation, Consumer Protection, and Enforcement Act.

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The term “virtual goods” has been popping up more and more often, probably because people are starting to realize what most online gaming companies already know: virtual goods are big business. Ironically (or maybe not), the sale of virtual goods is highest in free games. Even though the games themselves are free for anyone to play, it turns out the majority of players end up paying small amounts to upgrade their characters’ abilities or add virtual goods to their accounts in order to enhance their experience or increase their status.

In order to shed more light on the trends in virtual goods purchasing, market researcher VGMarket, along with Playspan, conducted a survey in July of this year, asking players what kinds of virtual goods they were buying and in what kind of games. The findings of the survey, summarized in a recent article posted on VentureBeat, show that over half of all virtual goods transactions occur in free-to-play games. (more…)

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: (more…)