1) What are the major forms of fraud affecting egaming in 2011 and what are you doing to deal with these threats on behalf of operators?

Fraud can be very specific to particular gaming channels and major forms include charge backs, identity theft, first and third party fraud and various forms of bonus abuse.

At GB Group we take the approach that an end-to-end view of the customer is the most effective way to counter fraud opportunities. In using multiple data sources we aim to identify multiple flags and assess any correlation to produce alert flags for potential fraudsters relevant to clients' business models. We constantly add to our already extensive range of data and enhanced software to cross reference data in real-time.

With this as our driver, we recently integrated our global Device ID check provided by Iovation and a community-based check, powered by Ethoca. Both checks are accessible through one single platform. Our velocity check allows operators to screen against previous applications that have provided identity information to repeatedly commit fraud.

GB Group also offers a constant analysis of data to identify fraud as it comes through and enables operators to address it immediately.

2) Are there any new forms of fraud emerging that operators need to be aware of? What damage are these having on businesses in the sector?

Mobile Gaming is a new growth area for operators and we can expect fraud risk to increase in line with this. The input of data is more cumbersome via a mobile and operators try to strike a balance between getting enough data to confidently verify individuals and easing the customer journey, without being intrusive to a point at which customers will drop off. Operators using this channel have a reticence to the use of 3D Secure due to the complicated nature of the process.

GB Group's mobile phone verification allows an operator to validate numbers and, combined with a range of global identity verification checks, put substantial barriers in the way of fraudsters.

Identity theft is still one of the fastest growing types of fraud. To counter this we use our matching technology to triangulate different data sets globally, making it much harder for fraudsters to succeed.

3) How is the move from dot.com into dot.country regulated markets in Europe affecting the work you do in the egaming sector?

It is important to have solutions in place to counter fraud in international markets, as global growth is key to many of our clients. That's where we have invested heavily over the past twelve months and this will remain important to our future product roadmap. However, the challenge for all providers is to source quality data that will fit legal requirements.

GB Group's aims to move countries to our tier 1 status, which equates to offering the same or better data sources expected in mature and secure markets such as the UK. Our objective is to source and obtain the breadth of data that is globally available. There is lots of clever stuff happening, but where we add value is pulling it all together.

Although there are big markets in Europe, finding the right data is even more important in Asian countries, where information is very hard to find. That's where GB Group's international expertise and knowledge comes in.

Overall, we have found better quality data not only helps to verify customers, but also cross reference data sets, increasing the changes to spot potential fraudsters internationally.

4) Although gambling transactions are often viewed as high-risk transactions by card issuers, what is the reality of 'chargeback' in this sector compared to other online businesses and how can you help with this?

Chargebacks are an ongoing issue, but we do not believe gaming is at any greater risk than some other sectors and there is an argument to say the market is more sophisticated than most in countering this risk.

The larger operators move more towards 3D Secure to shift liability from the merchant to the card-issuing bank. Used in isolation, this will not be completely effective, and we always advise to enhance this with other fraud and identification checks.

5) The sector is arguably still seen as more prone to cybercrime than other sectors. Why do you think this is, and how can this be addressed?

We think online gaming is at the forefront of addressing cybercrime. Reputational risk is often a key to this and at GB Group we have made sure, through our ISO 27001 qualification and Payment Card Industry (PCI) accreditation, that we can enhance our client's reputations by ensuring their data is secure.

6) What role are new and emerging technologies playing in the fight against fraud in the egaming sector?

New technologies and data sources are invaluable components in the fight against fraud and at GB Group we constantly invest in both of them to support the egaming sector. The real advantage of our Identity Management solutions is that, through the use of our propriety technology, we give access to the widest and most current levels of UK and international identity data.

Every good relationship takes a lot of “woo-ing” and as I’ve been chasing the Data Discoveries business for well over a year, we believe this union will be a great one.  My first advances were perhaps misunderstood (...was I a serious suitor, or just an opportunistic one...) –  but patience and  persistence plus regular opportunities to meet just confirmed that we’ve got a lot in common and that we ought to make that important next step...

We first were attracted to Data Discoveries as a result of their customer feedback and market reputation.  It was pretty clear that their customers were very loyal and the products and services deployed were well regarded.  We also discovered in the dialogues we had that the cultures and objectives of our businesses were also very well aligned.

At GB Group we’re taking our Tracing business very seriously, with some unique products and a strong and growing reputation in the market.  The addition of the Data Discoveries products and customers to the GB family helps confirm us as the market leader in tracing software, but crucially it also adds product vision and development skills to the business to help drive this business even faster.  Data Discoveries also brings us customers and competences in the identity related marketing products and services that underpin much of GB Group’s traditional strengths.

So, this posting is another strand of our welcome to GB Group for the people and customers of Data Discoveries. 

I know the newly combined team all share a common passion to ensure we are the natural partner for customers who are looking to use our services to REALLY understand the identity of their customers.   If every advance I make of this type takes a year, however, I think I’ll give the on line dating companies a wide berth...

Nick

Sony’s announcement this week that its online PlayStation network has been hacked has left its 77 million users feeling angered and concerned. At the top of Sony’s To-Do list will be to make sure it has the necessary security infrastructure in place to ensure this doesn’t happen again. However, the company will also be looking closely at how criminals will try and use the stolen data, which includes email addresses, postal addresses and in some cases credit card details.

In some instances, online fraudsters only need a name, postcode and date of birth to apply for a credit card under someone else’s name. And while unlikely, Sony’s data breach could result in a number of cases where user information is exploited for illegal purposes. For example, people who have the same password for their PlayStation account as for other websites, such as their webmail provider, Facebook or Amazon, could be at real risk.

And it’s not just PlayStation’s customers who should be concerned. Online retailers and other organisations could potentially be the victims of fraud if they lack sufficient identity verification technology to determine legitimate customers from fake ones. Websites which don’t have advanced verification tools leave themselves open to attack from fraudsters, who deliberately enter real customer details to obtain products and services illegally. Although the true outcome of the data breach won’t be known for some time, the news should serve as a warning shot for Sony’s customers and online retailers to act now so they don’t end up victims of fraud.

John

Just as private-sector organisations are having to do, the Spending Review will force the government and public sector to sweat its assets. It will need to make full use of the tools it gathered in the boom years and also take advantage of the phenomenal data sets that it has collected, to gain better insights into challenges and make processes more automated and efficient.

Data within public sector organisations is still managed in silos and, because the majority of administration methods are paper-based, this data is rarely shared or cross-referenced, which means processes are hugely inefficient and expensive. Outdated processes and systems could also have a major impact on the rise in fraud within organisations – in the public or private sector.

The latest estimates of fraud in the public sector put losses between £18bn and £25bn a year. The National Fraud Authority (NFA) estimates up to £6billion could be saved across Government over the next three years if departments got behind the initiatives and invested appropriately in preventing fraud*.

The coalition government and the Spending Review is set to turn the public sector on its head. Drastic budget cuts will mean that even the most stuck in the mud institutions are having to reassess the ways in which they operate – and will therefore be forced to re-evaluate current assets. Most local governments have the data and technology available to them to approach the expected cuts with confidence that they have the ability to survive on much lower budgets.

One area that is likely to suffer heavily is the housing sector. According to news released on the BBC’s website yesterday, the social housing budget is expected to be cut in half. This could have severe complications when it comes to unlawful subletting and occupancy and could lead to an increase in housing fraud. As such, local governments need to be extra vigilant when assigning budgets; making sure they allocate these to the right people. This is where the right technology and solutions come into play.
 
There is a range of motivations for unlawful subletting and occupancy, and therefore work to tackle this issue needs to be balanced with the effort to deal with the causes and help prevent incidents from occurring in the first place. Work to reduce the levels of unlawful subletting and fraud should be linked to wider organisational strategies and policies. Failure to do so, and an increase in fraud as a result, can have a devastating effect on individuals and businesses alike, causing a range of financial and emotional harms, which have often remained unrecognised.

John Feenan
Head of Public Sector, GB Group

* Statistics sourced from NFA’s ‘Fraud in the Public Sector’ Post Event Report. Event held on 24th September 2010

We’re all fans of Captain Jack at my house. That’s not the dashing leader of the Torchwood spin –off, but Johnny Depp’s cavalier Pirate of the Caribbean. This suggests, rightly, that viewing habits in my house are tailored to the identity characteristics of my two teenage daughters - with Keira Knightley thrown in to keep my interest (as a social study in the role of the feminist in the 18th century of course...)

Depp’s definition of on-boarding would involve a cunning and opportunistic raid on a treasure laden ship - but in our struggling economy on-boarding is taking on a new meaning, becoming an increasingly important aspect of sales growth for the modern consumer facing business.

Businesses all need to launch new products, often through new channels, and all talk the mantra about attracting new customers and increasing share of wallet. The reality today, however, is a business development team launching a new product or service will have IT resource constraints, legacy systems to change, time to market demands, limited budgets and probably a conservative attitude to risk from senior management.

In these conditions, outsourcing of services becomes a serious option for businesses which need to stay agile and want to align costs with the benefits they derive. The traditional outsourcers, however, can be as ponderous around process, system change and timescales as some of the customers they serve.

The delivery of an effective on-boarding service requires more than just IT expertise. It’s about designing micro-sites that attract and retain visitors, it’s about easy customer validation and authentication processes that make customers sign up (and weed out the fraudsters) and it’s about the relevance and quality of the communication process in those first 90 days. Customer experience is king in the on-line World.

GB Group now finds itself in a unique position. We’ve got 20 plus years experience in validating customer sign up processes, we host data, we provide managed marketing services, we integrate ID check s into client business applications. We also have an agile approach to delivery of services which has meant that, for some clients, we’ve been able to deploy solutions in literally years less than internal IT or our competitors.

So customer on-boarding isn’t a market opportunity for pirates, but it’s probably not one for the established outsourcers or ponderous marketing services providers either. Businesses need fast time to market, and customers need intuitive, easy to use web sites to find, navigate and buy from. This is GB Group’s expertise, building on our deep understanding of how to use identity characteristics to improve the sales and marketing capability of our clients. Businesses seeking help to build an end to end customer take-on service will find GB Group a very capable partner...

Nick

This weekend I have the pleasure of fighting my way onto a discount airline seat with three kids more luggage than is really necessary and my amazingly tolerant wife keeping us all happy.

Of course this is the same journey many have planned or have ventured over the summer weeks. But with the cheap flights and option of booking your own villa from the web, how do you know when you arrive at your destination, the villa will be either there, rented to you or not double booked.

The holiday rental market is not particularly well regulated and owners can register a property for rental with the minimalist of checks being carried out on them. In fact, most sites don’t even check that the owner is who they say they are.

Worried? Perhaps you should be, but things are changing. More internet sites are getting wise to fraud against holiday makers and are implementing ID and Verification checks carried out by GB Group before the owner can advertise a property.

These checks are done in real time and exclude gangs who hit property internet sites consistently trying to advertise bogus properties. They gangs scrape pictures from other internet sites, write a fictitious itinerary of the place and post them.

But good anti fraud platforms with ID and authentication processes can eliminate almost all the criminals from committing fraud, stealing your money and ruining your hard earned break.

So if you have booked a villa like I have, make sure the advertising site does the kind of checks above, otherwise you may become one of the many holiday makers turning up to an empty plot, double booked villa or private address hoping for the best.

Smugly, I have booked mine through one of our customers, so now I only have the Spanish Traffic Control strike and the BAA airport strike to contend with. There is nothing like de-stressing on your summer break…

If you are off on holiday – have a good one!

John

They’re not shy for a bit of publicity this new Government. Not content with targeting 40% spending cuts in public services and taking free school milk away (those under 5’s won’t be voting for years!) we’re back on the benefits fraud trail again. It’s an obvious target really and one that a succession of Governments have tried to tackle. The difference here is that for the first time Government is acknowledging the role of tracking financial transactions in identifying potential fraud by an individual. Now this is not a completely new initiative - credit data has been used by Central and Local Government for a while, to help identify potential fraud around benefits such as the single person council tax discount or housing benefit claims.

The difference, however, sounds like a much more co-ordinated use of credit file transaction data by the DWP to identify potential fraudsters, together with a risk reward model to encourage potential suppliers with the resource to be involved with the collection process too. The latter point of course limits the number of potential suppliers to, well, Experian really! It will be interesting to see what benefits being a “bounty hunter” does to their consumer friendly “let us check your credit report” image. Sometimes you need to be careful not to bite the hand that feeds you! I also wonder whether the DWP are completely happy with so much hype by Experian regarding their involvement in these projects. Have they been officially appointed without a formal procurement process? Time will tell.

However, there is still much less avaricious companies can do to help Government fight fraud and it’s not just data from the credit file that helps. GB Group has been helping Local Government identify properties missing from the Council Tax register, for example, to help ensure that a fair level of tax is collected for properties they serve.

As my colleague Paul Fox observes, the real savings will come from the work around prevention of error in the processes and data management in the DWP. Fraud prevention is the emotive “headline grabber” for an Experian, but GB Group is all about helping get the data right up front and simplifying the process of proof of identity of the claimant before they access a benefit. This also of course will make it easier for the deserving to receive the benefits they need.

We’re all up for some good PR and benefits fraud is a good headline grabber. Well done Experian for getting more out of the headlines than David Cameron! The hard yards for the Government, DWP and its suppliers, however, will be reaching beyond the management of existing fraud and get the upfront processes right to prevent it happening in the first place. This is where GB Group and the serious players can really help. Let’s hope that once the headline grabbers have settled down we can all help Ian Duncan Smith with the real savings offered by making the process of claiming benefits simple and accurate in the first place.

Then we can all worry about Experian interrogating our spending habits without our permission...

Barney Frank the US Congressman got his bill passed last week which will start the journey of the opening of the US eGaming market.  eGaming is a market that doesn’t seem to suffer recession and is full of some of the best entrepreneurs you’re lucky enough to mix with.  There have been a number of markets that restrict the growth of this sector which purely from a business perspective is strange as ‘high growth, entrepreneurial sectors always drive growth in other sectors’ not noticeably aligned at first glance.

eGaming has driven higher security transactions for payments, shopping and networking over the web.  The industry is helping to build out the digital infrastructure which is providing employment and tax revenues to many countries.

There are of course morale issues around some of the eGames, however today’s technology can with high accuracy exclude gamers below the legal age restriction, prevent identify fraud and restrict access to ‘exclusion lists’ to prevent self harm.  This is where GB Group come in, we provide the highest accuracy of ID for gamers, worldwide via the most simplest to integrate and most sophisticated anti fraud and risk engine available.  The same technology can be used to provide accurate tax reporting by player and territory. 

At the end of August I am flying out to the US to start explaining why GB Group eGaming clients are best placed to serve the US market, how they use our technology and why GB Group clients are best of breed when it comes to exceeding expectations and requirements of the US authorities. I’m guessing I will need to visit a number of times over the next few months and I am happy to meet up with anyone out there.  But for now I need to go and fill in some on-line forms to get the right to travel this summer, although shouldn’t be a problem as ‘apparently they use the services of a well known IDV provider’ that I hold close to my heart.

John

It was strangely disturbing to read that Martha Lane Fox is going to get us all on-line by 2015.  My daughter was really non-plussed by this as she is on-line all the time – and quarter past eight is when she gets up to make her 8.30AM college classes.  My mum, however, is waging a single woman war against  the Internet.  Why shop on line when you can stand in a cold bus queue for an hour, pursuing a packet of sausages with the same grizzly determination that was once a feature of our hunter gatherer ancestors.

My generation stands neatly in the middle of this culture and technology clash.  I can’t understand how my daughter can operate three internet devices simultaneously – or indeed why she wants to.  Equally I am frustrated by my mother’s obstinate refusal to stop writing letters that need stamps or engage with technology that would help her in so many routine tasks.  Now my mother likes a cause and doesn’t like to lose.  I remember when the last - or last but one - Government tried to take her pension book away.   The idea of course was that the Department of Social Security (at the time, DWP now) and the Post Office would finally embrace the inevitable and instead of printing very expensive and easy to defraud pension books they would pay benefits straight into your bank account.    My mother would have none of this and campaigned (yes, in writing, with stamps) to maintain her right to a pension book.  She was quite infirm at the time, so she couldn’t actually collect the pension using the book and so I would have to grab some time from work,  go and queue at the Post Office, take the money out – and, yes, cross the road to pay it into her bank.  Looking back on this now she was either a passionate defender of the right to choose - or she really didn’t like me very much.

So Martha, you might think your challenge is trying to get BT or whoever to lay thousands of miles of thicker cable, but your real battle will be to make the internet easier to use.  This isn’t just about clicking on the internet explorer icon, it’s about the complexity and time it takes to register for services (anyone ever forgotten their 128 character HMRC log-on – only about 10 million or so of us on March 30th), filling in on-line forms, proving identity and working out which bit of information will be needed by which service provider.  It’s not so much Big Brother watching you, as the whole House and Davina McCall too.   Press the wrong key too many times and you get evicted...

At GB we’re pioneering the use of on-line identity tokens and working to make the process of accessing services across the internet easier.  We can see the value of the “single sign on” process but this time outside the enterprise IT environment.   This will allow citizens to choose what services to access, what information to share and will not need them to constantly repeat the registration process as they cross between booking a refuse collection with your local authority, paying your TV license or shopping for exotic holidays.  This is going to make the process of transacting online safer, easier and transfer more control to the citizen.

Martha, if my mother is to use the internet to order services she will need a clear incentive and the process will need to be simple.  Otherwise these silver not-quite-yet surfers will be collecting their stamps and will be out to write to you.  With pens.  And ink.  These are dangerous adversaries and they fight dirty.  Good luck.

Nick

It’s along way to work for me. Oxfordshire B roads, M40, M42, Toll Road, M6, M56, M53, A55 and a trip through the Chester Business Park…this is not a journey at the end of which you want to discover you’ve left your Company ID pass behind…

Through our security gate, pass and picture ready, quick cup of coffee (fresh, not machine, so I don’t need to remember the code) and then the blissful wait for Microsoft to grudgingly acknowledge your identity credentials at log in and deliver the morning email.

Security is vital to us at GB and we take the responsibility we have to manage the customer and individual identity data incredibly seriously, but by God, it can cramp your style. We have processes for system access, processes for view, rules for deletion, compliance for suppliers, guidelines for access for cleaners, shredders that could be used to invade Poland… and a regular stream of security audits from data partners like BT and Royal Mail as well as customers from all walks of industry. As we’re one of the few companies that have completed ISO27001 for Information Security, we are able to share best practise with some very large clients and partners.

So, all this increased security is part and parcel of our corporate world now. I remember the publicity associated with the data loss at HMRC two years ago and a trail of lost data file stories that followed it. At GB we hold and consolidate data that individuals, suppliers and customers trust us to manage and we simply can’t fail in this duty. However, across the very small digital divide Google is gathering data on individuals that isn’t consented. Young people are presenting details relating to their true identity on Facebook that their parents don’t know. Amazon is trying to sell you books based on the profile of that Mills & Boon romance you bought your granny last year…

We’ve all got along way to go to understand how we as individuals also keep ourselves both safe and properly represented in our digital identities. This is an area where control will increasingly pass to the individual. We’ll see progress in this transition with emerging technologies like OpenID or the iCard and at GB we’re looking to be at the forefront of the progress to personal identity management. The “winning technology” hasn’t emerged yet, but we are seeing small projects and pilots that will drive the transition towards a world where the consumer manages what data he or she releases to what organisation. That will be a challenge for the marketing departments of the future!

In the meantime, GB is a company you can trust to look after your data…and if you need to know anything about the M6, I’m your man!

Nick