Smartphone apps - US IP issues

[IanO]

Hey all,

This question is directed more at my fellow reps who may also have been coming across this issue recently, but will also act as a warning to non US based players.

We have had a couple of cases here where a player has been flagged as coming from the US. As we cannot accept players from there the accounts are automatically locked and the player notified. Pretty standard stuff. The problem is, these are U.K. based customers using a U.S. App on their mobile devices.

The customer I just spoke to this morning was using an app called 'Photon' on his smartphone. I'm not sure of the benefits of this app, but it's a US based company and using it was giving him a US IP address and causing the red flag, despite being in the UK.

It sucks for him as we've had to lock his account, request docs and carry out a full investigation to be sure... and my fear is that as more of these apps come on the market this may become quite the issue. From memory the last time this happened the player was using 'iswiffer' on his iPad with the same result.

Is this something any of you have already encountered? I checked but could not find a mention of it in the forums.

Iano

 

[Simmo!]

Rather than just block them, can you not simply add an over-ride for a player to select another country Iano?

As an aside, when the US States start opening, if you want some action, accuracy gets harder on ipv6:

In our recent tests, the GeoIP databases were 99.8% accurate on a country level, 90% accurate on a state level in the US, and 83% accurate for cities in the US within a 40 kilometer radius

 

[IanO]

Rather than just block them, can you not simply add an over-ride for a player to select another country Iano?

The problem is these players are not even aware the app does this to them. Both cases I have come across the players had been logging in from a desktop without issues, then one day decide to come in using one of these apps on a tablet or smartphone, and the system flags them and the accounts are locked.

 

[vinylweatherman]

The problem is these players are not even aware the app does this to them. Both cases I have come across the players had been logging in from a desktop without issues, then one day decide to come in using one of these apps on a tablet or smartphone, and the system flags them and the accounts are locked.

You should whitelist such players once you have verified that they are from an allowed country, and base the policing on the account number used, not the IP address.

The core issue is that the geolocation data is not, and has never been, 100% accurate. You will ALWAYS run into such problems with a small number of players. Aside from smartphones, tablets, and iPads, this is happening to users of desktop PCs with one of the UK's largest ISPs. The ISP is allocating untagged IP addresses, and for some reason, untagged is interpreted as being from the US. It seems that "null" for a location against an IP address is considered to mean it is from the US unless tagged otherwise. This is all down to the arrogance of the US that believes it owns the internet by default. The dot com domain is considered to mean the US, yet this is not how it is defined. dot com actually means a company domain tagged to no specific country.

It could be more accurate if all IP addresses were tagged properly in geolocation databases when issued to an ISP. It seems the current system leaves it up to the ISP to decide whether or not it considers passing along accurate geolocation data when allocating IP addresses to customers a priority.

A case in point has been Virgin Media, who seem to bring on a new batch of IP addresses without informing the keepers of geolocation databases that these should be tagged as being from the UK. This causes customers to suddenly get errors with things like the national lottery and BBC websites as they are being seen as not being from the UK. Fixing the problem then seems to be a case of pass the buck, rather than taking ownership of the issue and fixing it. UK customers who contact the national lottery to be whitelisted are told to go to their ISP, who in turn seek to pass the buck to someone else, even right back to the website that detected them from being from the US.

Dynamic allocation of IP addresses places a limit on the accuracy possible for geolocation, as the actual customer using a specific IP address can change from day to day. ISPs don't use convenient boundaries like towns, regions, etc when dynamically allocating a block of IP addresses from one of their nodes. This even makes it impossible to accurately locate IP address to a specific city, and close to the borders, a specific state or country.

These apps seem to make the problems even worse on mobile devices, as it seems the receiving web service is not seeing the true IP address allocated by the mobile network used, but something generated by an app that sends it's development company's IP addresses to a web service, not that of the customer's own provider.

The problem is not confined to online casinos either, it is a fundamental problem caused by trying to force the internet to do something it was designed to resist, adhering to national boundaries.

It only blocks the innocent players too, as any player from the US who wants to circumvent geolocation based blocking can do so, and fairly easily. Use of such circumvention is widespread when it comes to accessing youtube from the UK, or even Google from China.

A US player who wants to play will find it relatively easy to circumvent the system, their problems will come when they want to withdraw - they will have to do much more than circumvent geolocation, they will need a false ID, false non-US address, bank account, etc.

 

[vinylweatherman]

Photon

Here's the problem:-

Photon's main claim to fame, and its claim as to why you should use it, is its Flash support, so let's start the review there.

Photon doesn't actually install Flash on your iPhone (that wouldn't work). Instead, like CloudBrowse, it connects your iPhone to a remote computer that can run Flash and then streams that desktop session to you. This can involve some slowness and interface quirks in the best of circumstances; that's true here but neither issue is too serious. If you want to use Flash, you simply tap the lightning bolt icon in the bottom right corner of the app to initiate the streaming desktop session. Once you do that, browsing is largely standard.

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It is the remote computer's IP address that you see as a casino operator, not that of the players' own device or even mobile ISP.

The root cause is the fundamental issue of Flash being blacklisted by Apple from running directly on any iDevice, yet being an adopted standard among providers of internet based services. It will affect all players who use Apple devices where the remote computer running Flash on their behalf is located in the US, or otherwise ends up having a US IP address.

Whether Photon or another solution, players on Apple devices are being forced into this messy compromise because Apple are trying to force Flash off the internet as it has never been an agreed standard. Apple are trying to force web developers to ditch Flash in favour of the newer HTML standards that should work on both Apple and non-Apple products.

The only other option is to jailbreak your Apple device and directly install the Flash player on it. Apple are doing their best to prevent this.

 

[Mark_32Red (retired acct)]

Hi Ian,

I'm not aware of this particular app causing any issues for us - but your post will certainly help us if our players go down that route.

I can't help, but just wanted to say thanks for a useful post.

Regards,
Mark