Safeguarding Online Gaming Athletes From Potential Cyber Risks

India’s gaming market is at an unprecedented inflection point, especially after COVID-19 led growth. The current market size stands at $2.2Bn, poised to grow to $7B by 2026 (India Gaming Report 2021 by Lumikai and Redseer). Moreover, there are as many as 450M active gamers in India now, 100M of whom pay money to the tune of $16/year per user on gaming platforms. With a great growth, greater challenges around identity frauds, compliance and user experience have come to the fore. Let’s discuss these in detail.

Possible Risks in Online Real Money Gaming

The real-money gaming segment in India is divided into two categories i.e., fantasy gaming and online card games. Both categories comprise risks and threats that need to be adhered to such as prevention of underage gaming, ensuring players in banned states are not participating in the ecosystem, and KYC/ AML checks for the money involved:

· Identity Checks The common types of identity frauds include identity spoofing, use of fraudulent accounts and placing fake bets, and mismatch between the registered user and the player accessing the platform.

· Address Checks: Many Indian states have banned real-money games. Regulatory compliance necessitates that gaming platforms don’t sign up players from these states on their platforms.

· Age Verification: Users below the age of 18 are strictly prohibited from games that involve stakes. Gaming companies must ensure that minors or children below the age of 18 are not getting unlawful access to their platforms.

· Anti-Money Laundering: Since players are competing against each other, there are scenarios when bad actors collaborate to take advantage of other players - causing a big reputational risk for the industry as well. Eliminating the use of illicit or suspicious transactions and black money on the platforms is also mandated by the law.

User Experience Vs Compliance

Anti-fraud and compliant user onboarding necessitates active checks against each risk to avoid financial, reputational, and regulatory oversight. But long and complicated onboarding experience adds friction to the user journey. Player onboarding with high turnaround time can lead to high account abandonment rate and poor user experience. Deploying cutting-edge technology is crucial to strike the winning balance between meeting compliance, onboarding players faster at scale, and building seamless digital onboarding journeys.

Role of Technology in Balancing User Experience With Compliance and Fraud Prevention

India is the fourth largest online gaming market globally, but the lack of the right authentication technology still restrains the high potential. Leveraging AI-powered technology solutions help real money gaming companies identify bad actors and aggregate data across various sources not limited to criminal background checks. Using IT solutions to validate and verify the personal information of gamers limits the risk for the gaming companies and lets compliance experts take ownership of the safekeeping of data. Some technologies that enable gaming platforms include:

· Face Match and Liveness Detection: Face match technology validates a player by matching their ID to their selfie. Liveness detection ensures that a player accessing the platform exists in real-time.

· Optical Character Recognition (OCR): OCR technology catches document forgery and tampering easily, sieves fake applications from the real ones, and enables scalability and ease of onboarding with automated data capturing - resulting in seamless player onboarding experience and lower account abandonment rates.

· Digital Address Verification: Digital Address Verification captures the location of a user through geo-coordinates and helps in preventing location spoofing, allowing gaming businesses to stay compliant.

· Database-Driven Document Verification: NID verification against PAN or Aadhaar databases allows for quick verification of documents, establishing the identity of a player in real-time.

· Bank Account Verification: Verifying the bank account is crucial to prevent money laundering and financial crimes. Penny drop method validates bank details along with the beneficiary’s name.

End-to-End IT Solutions for Digital Transformation

Some of the top gaming businesses that we work with are leveraging cutting-edge technologies through API-led, end-to-end digital platforms focused on user experience. These platforms not only create one-stop onboarding journeys that have built-in checks against frauds, and regulatory oversight, but also deliver a competitive edge with seamless, agile, and scalable player onboarding.

(The given article is attributed to Arjit Bhargava, Senior Vice President, AuthBridge Research Services and has been created exclusively for BW Disrupt website)