iovation Research Finds People in U.S. are Taking More Evasive Measures Than Others Worldwide to Gamble Online

The iovation analysis found that 4.13 percent of online gambling transactions originating from the United States, predominantly to European gambling operators, used evasion techniques such as trying to hide their location. This is 119 percent higher than iovation’s finding that 1.89 percent of online gambling transactions from outside the U.S. used evasion techniques. In many countries and states, online casinos are restricted from accepting payments from U.S. citizens and therefore are unable to offer them gambling services.

“There is indeed a pent-up demand in the U.S., where gamblers will go to rather extreme measures to try to get around restrictions to become a customer of a foreign gambling site,” said iovation Executive Vice President of Corporate Development and Co-Founder, Jon Karl.

Some of the most glaring types of evasion techniques iovation has detected with online gambling transactions include:

• The use of the Tor Browser: Tor is a privacy protocol that is intended to help people browse the Internet anonymously.


• Hiding behind a proxy: Accessing the Internet through a proxy, a service that masks users' actual browser data, makes it more difficult to locate a user by means of an IP address.


• Geolocation mismatch: A person isn’t in the same time zone as their device displays.

“Device intelligence has proven effective at detecting customers trying to play on gambling sites from which they are restricted,” Karl continued. “This will be essential for gambling operators launching in the U.S. that will need to comply with interstate regulations and limit play by geographic boundaries.”

With the 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Assn. et al giving power to individual states to regulate sports betting, many states have introduced, or plan to introduce, legislation to legalize online sports gambling. Today there are a handful of states where online betting is authorized, with the highest profile being Nevada and New Jersey. With online gambling laws varying from state to state, gambling operators must be able to tell whether or not someone is placing a bet from inside a state where online betting has been legalized.

Methodology

iovation came to its conclusions by analyzing the more than half a billion online transactions it evaluated for its global gambling customers from March 2018 to March 2019. Those operators use iovation’s intelligence based on its experience with nearly 6 billion devices, insight into unique device behavioral patterns and cryptographically secure multifactor authentication methods to fight fraud, maintain security and ensure compliance.

iovation will discuss its findings at the ICE North America gambling conference that is underway in Boston at booth D50 or in two separate sessions today at 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. For other iovation intelligence about online gambling trends, read iovation’s 2019 Gambling Industry Report.