Casino bonuses are an important part of online gambling, and you can find them on every casino site. For example, when you visit the vegas casino online real money, you will find that there are a number of promotions offered to both new and existing members. These bonuses give the player a certain advantage, but there are also people who want to abuse them. They are called “bonus abusers” and can be quite costly to online casinos. Below, we’ll tell you more about bonus abuse and talk about how casinos are fighting it.
What Is Bonus Abuse?
Bonus abuse, in its simplest form, is the misuse of promotions offered by online casinos to gain an unfair advantage. There are multiple ways to do this, and an abuser can be professional enough to use stolen identities.
For example, let’s say it is possible to win 1,000 CAD with a welcome bonus: if the match rate is high enough, you can win this money by depositing a small amount (i.e., 200 – 300 CAD). Such a bonus is based on the logic that the player will continue to play at the casino and spend more money than the bonus amount over time. So, the casino does indeed give the player 1,000 CAD, but before that, it trusts the player to spend more than this amount.
An abuser will focus on unlocking the 1,000 CAD balance by spending less than that with different techniques. For example, if the abuser can do this by spending only 700 CAD, they will make a profit of 300 CAD. As we mentioned above, there are different ways to do this. You can see some examples below:
- Claiming multiple bonuses at the same time by creating multiple accounts.
- Increasing the frequency of wins by playing games with high RTP.
- Using simple yet effective tactics that give the advantage to the player (mostly used in blackjack and roulette).
- Playing with the bonus balance until a feature that is expected to pay high is about to get triggered, then continue playing with the real balance.
- Abusing gaps in the bonus terms of use (for example, if there is no maximum bet limit, the abuser can complete the requirement even with a single game in a very short time).
While these are comprehensive tactics, professional abusers go even further. With a bot network, they can open hundreds of accounts within minutes and collect welcome bonuses. They can also withdraw the bonus money by completing wagering conditions with stolen credit cards. This is one of the most practical ways to launder money, too, because the money the casino will send you will be “clean”. Stolen credentials are used to complete the KYC process, and this can be a surprisingly easy thing if the casino staff has not received the necessary training.
Ways to Fight Against Bonus Abuse
There is no clear data on how much online casinos lose due to bonus abuse, but iGaming is an industry with a size of close to 100 billion dollars, and we can say that casino sites use an average of 25% of their total budget for marketing (i.e., bonuses). If only 1% of this budget was abused, the total figure would still be huge. There are multiple methods that online casinos use to combat this scam, and the most well-known (and most effective) of these is “wagering requirements”. This condition requires a certain amount of money to be wagered before the bonus becomes withdrawable. It is a measure that can be quite effective, but it has two major shortcomings:
- If the rest of the bonus terms of use do not support the wagering requirements, it may not be effective against players playing high RTP games or using certain special tactics. The wagering requirement needs to be supplemented by additional conditions such as the maximum bet limit and prohibited tactics.
- It is not effective against professional criminals who complete wagering requirements with stolen debit cards.
Therefore, casinos need to approach the problem of bonus abuse from different angles and, above all, modernize their software, making the KYC process much more efficient. The vast majority of casino sites operate on platforms developed years ago, and their staff is not adequately trained in KYC fraud. Taking modern precautions against identity and card theft will greatly prevent bonus abuse. It can even help prevent money laundering.
For example, modern casino software can automatically detect and block devices with suspicious IP addresses and flag certain accounts based on the speed at which a process (i.e., registration) is completed. Likewise, it is possible to suspect bonus abuse by looking at playing patterns. Such modern systems often use third-party services for KYC verification and work much more efficiently than in-house systems. In other words, it is possible for an online casino to greatly prevent bonus abuse by updating its software.
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