SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
As technology advances at a rapid rate, fraud is a recurring problem in the sports betting sector.
During a recent SBC Digital Day, Nick Gunn, SVP Growth at SEON, Filip Gvardijan, Head of Fraud Prevention at Superbet and Krassi Ivanova, 10bet’s Head of Fraud, discussed the issue at hand.
They looked at how companies should not only look at fraud as something they needed to be prevented, but as a competitive advantage to a business.
After having been in the industry for a long time, Ivanova began by explaining how different the issue of fraud is to what it once was. She said: “In 2008, we didn’t have systems like SEON that would do it for us. We had to manually check IP addresses, request documents one by one and review them separately.
“Now we still do some security guarding, but it’s now on a way bigger scale, way more elaborate than it was before. With the growth of technology, it was going to happen inevitably.”
Gvardijan built on this, commenting on how his own personal road to working in anti-fraud was ‘extremely fast paced’, but in a more modern era compared to Ivanova.
He stated: “When fraud directly impacts revenue and operational stability, which is something we experienced, then the conversion starts changing fast.”
Proactivity vs reactivity
Gvardijan explained that both proactivity and reactivity will always be present when it comes to building systems of fraud prevention.
“I think if you’re just starting, maybe speaking of software engineering terms, like the number of postmortems you’re writing, if it’s way above the number of times you actually managed to solve something up front you’re in reactive mode.
“Those are really good, because if you really do it properly it helps you build the systems you need and understand what you’re missing.”
Meanwhile, Gvardijan suggested that shifting towards being able to quickly react and add data points may be more important than just building a super model, as ‘there will always be something you need to add’.
He concluded: “We learn quickly by observing. That’s the name of the game. That’s the productivity you want.”
