Tips Bonus Abuse and Multi-Accounting - The Extent in The UK

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Some of you guys may like to read this to get an insight of the type of behaviour casinos face daily and why they make such extensive checks.

Interesting stuff!

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Many years spent successfully exploiting industry bonus structures has given the group known as Ada Lovelace a deep understanding of all the loopholes and why the industry is failing so abjectly when it comes to dealing with bonus abuse. They tell their story to iGB
Pease forgive the pseudonym. Having the ability to ‘print money’ from the industry has drawn a lot of unwanted attention from fraudsters. We go by the name of Ada Lovelace – an homage to the first publicly recognised female coder. What began as an individual project soon became a partnership. We worked together against the industry for more than 10 years before turning our trade on its head.

Loopholes and exploits
We were one of many making six-figure careers out of exploiting the industry through a number of methods. Like others, we started with risk-free matched betting after being introduced to it by friends. After proving the concept we started multi-accounting with the help of friends and family. As bank balances grew, we started up-scaling and taking more risk in exchange for higher rewards by moving on to casino advantage play and exploits. We started recruiting people to do the work and purchased piles of laptops.

We gravitated towards others that were doing the same and became well-acquainted with several large multi-accounting operations. Our associates specialised in different areas, and we found our own niche in identifying exploitable site mechanics.

The loopholes fascinated us. We spent upwards of £20,000 testing bonus engines and other site mechanics, and through trial and error identified several major flaws within the site mechanics, bonus structures and risk triggers. We also discovered human error within payments teams and customer service.

Knowing what to look for, we paid people to run through the GB Gambling Commission’s register of operators to collect specific data from each site. This data gave a strong indication of which sites were exploitable, so we went on to test over 400 sites from more than 100 operators. On most of them, we were able to manipulate the bonus structure to either massively reduce or completely circumvent the required wagering, and in many instances create duplicate accounts. We would occasionally do GDPR requests to give us better insight into the operators’ available data, which helped us to remain undetected.

We wanted to scale up our profits but were too risk-averse to recruit thousands of identities. Instead, we sold our findings to those who found these exploits far more valuable than us. These loopholes were sometimes worth millions in exploitable value to large operations.

Poacher turned gamekeeper
One of us had entered into a conversation with a tier-one operator that we were personally exploiting – we’d taken over £70k from them in a few months. They were very interested in tackling the problem and we wanted a new challenge. Our collaboration was a huge success and led to us working with a further 12 operators. As a result of our work, we have saved them millions in lost revenue.

Bonus abuse guides have been around in the UK for at least 13 years and have become increasingly popular, with coverage in major media outlets including the HuffPost, Telegraph and Guardian, as well as popular websites Save the Student and Moneysavingexpert and, most recently, the BBC documentary Can You Beat The Bookies? The main six bonus abuse groups in the UK have 184,000 paid subscribers. Many of these members operate multiple accounts. Although difficult to quantify, our calculations put the total figure at roughly one million identities being used in the UK.

Depending on how much time is invested, individuals in the UK can realistically make £4,000 from welcome offers and then £1,500-plus per month profit from retention offers. Nearly two-thirds of this value comes from casino offers. Bonus abuse forums are now focusing on automating matched betting, with tools such as the Each Way Sniper becoming widely available. This bot integrates with the front end of many operators to automatically place value bets 24/7.

The available profits decrease over time as accounts become ‘bonus banned’ or ‘stake restricted’. This naturally leads individuals to recruit their friends and family so they can continue and increase their profits, which in turn breeds multi-accounting. With the law untested on multi-accounting in this industry, others have adopted less discreet recruitment methods such as gathering identities from outside job centres or posting ads on social media.

‘Stratsol’ is one of many large multi-accounting operations and they recruit publicly online. They have over 3,600 members, a referral scheme, a registered company name, 20 staff members – and a driver that comes to your home to take KYC photos and apply for a bank card. With that many members they may have made up to £14m just from targeting acquisition offers. If they also targeted retention offers and knew how to exploit site mechanics, the figure would be higher.

Into the mainstream
Bonus abuse has become mainstream in the UK, and we are seeing similar patterns emerge in other countries. There is big money in providing membership guides and many of them are hoping to get a foothold in other markets. Betting exchanges rely on matched bettors to generate liquidity in their lay markets and team up with these forums to offer preferential commissions. Some exchanges even offer tools and guides on bonus abuse. With the prevalence of purchasing identities online, anyone can create a multi-accounting operation anywhere in the world. The combined value of welcome offers in Germany, for example, is magnitudes higher than in the UK.

Affiliates are also often bonus abusers. They know from trial and error what bonus abuse strategies or mechanical manipulations will evade the operators and can use some of these tactics to profit from affiliate schemes by creating ‘losses’ that aren’t genuine.

VIP thresholds are tested by some bonus abusers who happily take a loss in the process, knowing that once they identify the thresholds, they can gain VIP status and the profits will outweigh their cost of entry. They can rinse and repeat this with multiple identities.

Knowledge gap
There is a huge disparity in knowledge, in part because very few people with the necessary skills make it into the industry. It’s not surprising when abusing bonuses can be far more lucrative than a salary.

There is a misconception that you can’t effectively tackle bonus abuse without damaging genuine players. The truth is that you can’t effectively reward genuine players without tackling bonus abusers first. And to tackle bonus abuse, you need to be able to identify the unique behaviours and trends of bonus abusers.

A simple example of this disparity can be seen by the way the industry miscalculates the overall value of their casino offers:

  • Bonus – (house edge x wagering requirement)
This calculation does not incorporate the ‘bust rate’ which affects the amount of wagering completed in relation to the bonuses provided. The bust rate is affected by stake size and game volatility. There is a counterintuitive barrier to the understanding that the higher the chance the player has of busting, the higher the average exploitable value.

Many operators have a heavy reliance on P/L which isn’t very useful for early detection. Bonus abusers lose more times than not (often around 80-90% of the time). Their profits come from the larger wins when they eventually do win. Understanding the optimal strategy adopted by bonus abusers is a much better measure of the player’s risk.

Bonus abuse is also a cross-departmental issue, and with each department having its own objectives, the issue often falls through the gaps. The industry as a whole has a tendency to deal with bonus abuse retrospectively, seemingly only able to identify the abuse after it has happened, when specific trends become obvious to the untrained eye. Even once risky behaviour has been identified, there are many barriers to accessing and correlating all of the necessary data to identify the scale of the issue and all involved players.

The reliance on third-party products and the lack of real-time centralised data means many operators can’t effectively prevent or detect abuse. A basic example of this is not utilising the source of traffic data. Many bonus abusers in their early career will follow links from bonus abuse forums, yet few operators are able to assign the traffic source to specific players. The poor use of data between core and third-party systems stifles almost every area of the industry. The ultimate solution is in linking data from every source to allow for real-time risk segmentation, layered with machine learning to identify abuse trends as they emerge. This requires working with innovative products, platform providers and operators to deliver industry-wide solutions.
 
Some of you guys may like to read this to get an insight of the type of behaviour casinos face daily and why they make such extensive checks.

Interesting stuff!

You do not have permission to view link Log in or register now.



Many years spent successfully exploiting industry bonus structures has given the group known as Ada Lovelace a deep understanding of all the loopholes and why the industry is failing so abjectly when it comes to dealing with bonus abuse. They tell their story to iGB
Pease forgive the pseudonym. Having the ability to ‘print money’ from the industry has drawn a lot of unwanted attention from fraudsters. We go by the name of Ada Lovelace – an homage to the first publicly recognised female coder. What began as an individual project soon became a partnership. We worked together against the industry for more than 10 years before turning our trade on its head.

Loopholes and exploits
We were one of many making six-figure careers out of exploiting the industry through a number of methods. Like others, we started with risk-free matched betting after being introduced to it by friends. After proving the concept we started multi-accounting with the help of friends and family. As bank balances grew, we started up-scaling and taking more risk in exchange for higher rewards by moving on to casino advantage play and exploits. We started recruiting people to do the work and purchased piles of laptops.

We gravitated towards others that were doing the same and became well-acquainted with several large multi-accounting operations. Our associates specialised in different areas, and we found our own niche in identifying exploitable site mechanics.

The loopholes fascinated us. We spent upwards of £20,000 testing bonus engines and other site mechanics, and through trial and error identified several major flaws within the site mechanics, bonus structures and risk triggers. We also discovered human error within payments teams and customer service.

Knowing what to look for, we paid people to run through the GB Gambling Commission’s register of operators to collect specific data from each site. This data gave a strong indication of which sites were exploitable, so we went on to test over 400 sites from more than 100 operators. On most of them, we were able to manipulate the bonus structure to either massively reduce or completely circumvent the required wagering, and in many instances create duplicate accounts. We would occasionally do GDPR requests to give us better insight into the operators’ available data, which helped us to remain undetected.

We wanted to scale up our profits but were too risk-averse to recruit thousands of identities. Instead, we sold our findings to those who found these exploits far more valuable than us. These loopholes were sometimes worth millions in exploitable value to large operations.

Poacher turned gamekeeper
One of us had entered into a conversation with a tier-one operator that we were personally exploiting – we’d taken over £70k from them in a few months. They were very interested in tackling the problem and we wanted a new challenge. Our collaboration was a huge success and led to us working with a further 12 operators. As a result of our work, we have saved them millions in lost revenue.

Bonus abuse guides have been around in the UK for at least 13 years and have become increasingly popular, with coverage in major media outlets including the HuffPost, Telegraph and Guardian, as well as popular websites Save the Student and Moneysavingexpert and, most recently, the BBC documentary Can You Beat The Bookies? The main six bonus abuse groups in the UK have 184,000 paid subscribers. Many of these members operate multiple accounts. Although difficult to quantify, our calculations put the total figure at roughly one million identities being used in the UK.

Depending on how much time is invested, individuals in the UK can realistically make £4,000 from welcome offers and then £1,500-plus per month profit from retention offers. Nearly two-thirds of this value comes from casino offers. Bonus abuse forums are now focusing on automating matched betting, with tools such as the Each Way Sniper becoming widely available. This bot integrates with the front end of many operators to automatically place value bets 24/7.

The available profits decrease over time as accounts become ‘bonus banned’ or ‘stake restricted’. This naturally leads individuals to recruit their friends and family so they can continue and increase their profits, which in turn breeds multi-accounting. With the law untested on multi-accounting in this industry, others have adopted less discreet recruitment methods such as gathering identities from outside job centres or posting ads on social media.

‘Stratsol’ is one of many large multi-accounting operations and they recruit publicly online. They have over 3,600 members, a referral scheme, a registered company name, 20 staff members – and a driver that comes to your home to take KYC photos and apply for a bank card. With that many members they may have made up to £14m just from targeting acquisition offers. If they also targeted retention offers and knew how to exploit site mechanics, the figure would be higher.

Into the mainstream
Bonus abuse has become mainstream in the UK, and we are seeing similar patterns emerge in other countries. There is big money in providing membership guides and many of them are hoping to get a foothold in other markets. Betting exchanges rely on matched bettors to generate liquidity in their lay markets and team up with these forums to offer preferential commissions. Some exchanges even offer tools and guides on bonus abuse. With the prevalence of purchasing identities online, anyone can create a multi-accounting operation anywhere in the world. The combined value of welcome offers in Germany, for example, is magnitudes higher than in the UK.

Affiliates are also often bonus abusers. They know from trial and error what bonus abuse strategies or mechanical manipulations will evade the operators and can use some of these tactics to profit from affiliate schemes by creating ‘losses’ that aren’t genuine.

VIP thresholds are tested by some bonus abusers who happily take a loss in the process, knowing that once they identify the thresholds, they can gain VIP status and the profits will outweigh their cost of entry. They can rinse and repeat this with multiple identities.

Knowledge gap
There is a huge disparity in knowledge, in part because very few people with the necessary skills make it into the industry. It’s not surprising when abusing bonuses can be far more lucrative than a salary.

There is a misconception that you can’t effectively tackle bonus abuse without damaging genuine players. The truth is that you can’t effectively reward genuine players without tackling bonus abusers first. And to tackle bonus abuse, you need to be able to identify the unique behaviours and trends of bonus abusers.

A simple example of this disparity can be seen by the way the industry miscalculates the overall value of their casino offers:

  • Bonus – (house edge x wagering requirement)
This calculation does not incorporate the ‘bust rate’ which affects the amount of wagering completed in relation to the bonuses provided. The bust rate is affected by stake size and game volatility. There is a counterintuitive barrier to the understanding that the higher the chance the player has of busting, the higher the average exploitable value.

Many operators have a heavy reliance on P/L which isn’t very useful for early detection. Bonus abusers lose more times than not (often around 80-90% of the time). Their profits come from the larger wins when they eventually do win. Understanding the optimal strategy adopted by bonus abusers is a much better measure of the player’s risk.

Bonus abuse is also a cross-departmental issue, and with each department having its own objectives, the issue often falls through the gaps. The industry as a whole has a tendency to deal with bonus abuse retrospectively, seemingly only able to identify the abuse after it has happened, when specific trends become obvious to the untrained eye. Even once risky behaviour has been identified, there are many barriers to accessing and correlating all of the necessary data to identify the scale of the issue and all involved players.

The reliance on third-party products and the lack of real-time centralised data means many operators can’t effectively prevent or detect abuse. A basic example of this is not utilising the source of traffic data. Many bonus abusers in their early career will follow links from bonus abuse forums, yet few operators are able to assign the traffic source to specific players. The poor use of data between core and third-party systems stifles almost every area of the industry. The ultimate solution is in linking data from every source to allow for real-time risk segmentation, layered with machine learning to identify abuse trends as they emerge. This requires working with innovative products, platform providers and operators to deliver industry-wide solutions.

Interesting indeed- are they just saying welcome bonuses have a positive EV and people are creating multi accounts to access them repeatedly? Or is there something more clever? Because that's been around as long as online casinos...
 
Just watched the BBC doc on youtube. They had a guy sitting courtside in the US on the phone to a guy in London and as the point was one the guy in London was placing the bet. When quick enough the bet is placed before the site is updated with the result.

On another note this company took thousands from casinos and then became a consultancy company against the fraudsters. Another great example of making some money an illegal way and then using your fraudulant knowledge to go legit. Some people have all the luck and the old saying of 'crime doesnt pay' couldnt be more irrelevant in todays society.
 
Was mentioning this article earlier in my post about what casinos are able to see. I know some ex casino abusers that work together with casinos in order to prevent fraud on their sites, and also are their affiliates. They also teach others on how to discover bugs, loopholes vulnerabilities in t&s plus bonus and sports betting abuse so they can bomb their competitors. There is always quite interesting action going on behind the scenes... :D.
 
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This is something where casino operator can save quite easily by investing to tools and knowledge to catch these early as possible, these peeps are quite well aware where you get paid without questions and where you are requested to provide loads of things (peeps who does these know almost right away that now casino is aware what we do) which often just makes them leave, especially when withdrawals often are small (WD right away when wagering completed, no single spin with real money, which is bit stupid to make something really obvious to make casino interested about account) and keep doing it in places who don't realize what's happening, there are so many casinos that there's no reason to try keep abusing places who realize it, so many don't.

Best of these impersonators are not doing things too obvious (when having big withdrawal, do some "normal" gameplay with real money etc...) which get flagged in every place, there are pros and amateurs in this like everywhere.

It just makes always wonder reasons why people are so strict against selfies or other request which is more than basic KYC, not too long time ago some new member here again opened thread where won over £3000 with welcome bonus but refused to comply with selfie+days paper, understand if somebody have strict principles and don't want to do something but then i wouldn't play online at all if taking selfie is too much (some SOW things i understand people don't wanna share), would hope to have enough money to just leave this kind of amounts for the casino because i don't feel to take selfie and send it to them (or what ever this players reason could be, didn't want to specify, rep was ready to get everything sorted but sending docs was too much).

Impersonating is issue what happen in UK as you only need somebody details to create account and collecting pictures of documents against small payment is not mission impossible as many are happy to share picture of their ID and proof of address for money. These articles published make probably few more to try this out, if you planning to do so, it's good to be aware that some places are quite good to find out things, some not and keep spending part of their profits to these same people who keep coming back with new identities time after time and their patterns are still not spotted.
 
Experienced abusers are usually prepared and know exactly what a specific casino is going to ask in order to verify their identity or a source of income. Casinos will never know for 100% if its a genuine player or abuser as nowadays they are simply able to provide anything that a genuine player would.

I bet this is a number one reason why some casinos ask for a ton of different information to their customers. Just imagine, who would you care more if you were a casino owner; about a regulator to contact you or your money get constantly pumped out of your business by different abusers?

All this negatively affects normal players, but not much we can do about it. A good practice I reckon is to verify the casino account in advance (before making a deposit).
 
The bottom line though is that the cost of all of this has to come from somewhere. I can't imagine casinos being taken for much - our RTP must suffer as a result of the extra expense surrounding the exploitation and then policing of these activities. It's rather like scamming insurance - we all pay for it.
 
The bottom line though is that the cost of all of this has to come from somewhere. I can't imagine casinos being taken for much - our RTP must suffer as a result of the extra expense surrounding the exploitation and then policing of these activities. It's rather like scamming insurance - we all pay for it.

Again, I'm not really understanding how using a promo as offered is abuse... It's like saying because some guy took advantage of the 50c soft serve at Macca's we're all gonna have to pay extra for ours.
If they can't afford the promo, don't offer it?
 
Experienced abusers are usually prepared and know exactly what a specific casino is going to ask in order to verify their identity or a source of income. Casinos will never know for 100% if its a genuine player or abuser as nowadays they are simply able to provide anything that a genuine player would.

I bet this is a number one reason why some casinos ask for a ton of different information to their customers. Just imagine, who would you care more if you were a casino owner; about a regulator to contact you or your money get constantly pumped out of your business by different abusers?

All this negatively affects normal players, but not much we can do about it. A good practice I reckon is to verify the casino account in advance (before making a deposit).

There are something you can request which many of these are not really comfortable or easily can't provide if impersonating other people, if withdrawal is just some hundreds, they usually just leave and ignore casinos requests. Then of course some 5 figure winnings most usually comply with everything (and if knowing what actually doing, have been making sure that there is no any "stupid" traces showing in audit trail etc...), if you usee some strangers identity with some fee paid, you probably can get quite many docs from that person if you offer some more money, can be quite significant amount, depending how much money there is pending.

Some are really good in this but most are not pros when they start and learn by doing and making stupid mistakes which are there once done. Casinos who pretend to really give these peeps harder time, are often left more alone as there are so many available where your risk to get anything more than basic KYC is microscopic so no need to go places who actually might make your life harder when so many most ask basic KYC.
 
Again, I'm not really understanding how using a promo as offered is abuse... It's like saying because some guy took advantage of the 50c soft serve at Macca's we're all gonna have to pay extra for ours.
If they can't afford the promo, don't offer it?
True - if the promo states "Enter as many times as you like". In these cases the promo is offered on a once-only per person basis and is claimed fraudulently through pretence. The casinos police their offers (at cost - as mentioned above). Personally, my failure rate on wagering these is quite high - probably due to the reduced RTP :eek2: - paradox anyone ??:)
 
I know this is an old post but can you go to jail for abusing bonus on a casino? Ive had a lot of success on it this month but now at this point i dont want to be jailed lol
 
I know this is an old post but can you go to jail for abusing bonus on a casino? Ive had a lot of success on it this month but now at this point i dont want to be jailed lol
Fair dues to u mate these shits have been screwing punters for ever and as for the guy who fucked over bet 365 and got 5 years, he should have been given a knighthood ffs and not a prison sentence...
 

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