Cybercriminals Have Set Their Sights on Ontario, GeoComply Says

Ontario’s budding iGaming market continues to be targeted by international scammers, a recent GeoComply report highlighted. This news comes a year after online gambling was launched in the Canadian province.

The launch of iGaming and online sports betting in Ontario has proven a success. However, this success has also attracted a lot of fraudsters, the report shows. While GeoComply emphasized that customers are most protected when playing with licensed operators, it also added that a lot of people have been trying to cheat the system.

Ontario Attracted a Lot of Attention

Starting with the good news, GeoComply said that the number of total player accounts in the province is set to exceed a million. Revenue, meanwhile, is on track to smash half-a-billion Canadian dollars.

GeoComply added that the launch of iGaming in Ontario attracted a lot of attention from players all over the world. Since the regulated market was launched in April last year, over 744,000 international users have attempted to log in 19.9 million times to Ontario operators.

The geolocation specialist added that 54,000 users from the United States have attempted 305,000 logins. It concluded that a total of 3.3 million location spoofing attempts have been made.

Many Fraudsters Were Drawn to the Market

While the Ontario market attracted the attention of players all over the world, it, unfortunately, attracted the attention of many fraudsters as well. According to GeoComply, the first year of iGaming in the province saw over 219,000 devices blocked from gambling for fraud reasons. GeoComply noted that it has detected a whopping 1,045 fraud rings affecting multiple operators.

GeoComply’s services, in particular, prevented 127,000 devices known to be associated with fraud from accessing the market. In addition, 56,000 devices with multiple users (a usual sign of bonus abuse) were barred from playing.

GeoComply also banned 34,000 that used illicit software that hid the players’ actual location. Lastly, the geolocation specialist was able to identify and block 1,500 jailbroken devices.

DiRienzo Noted that Cybercrime Rates Are Rising

The matter was addressed by Danny DiRienzo, GeoComply’s director of risk services. He said that online fraud is a serious problem that continues to get worse. He noted that the recorded fraud attempts mostly included identity theft, bonus abuse and some instances of account takeovers and credit card chargebacks.

Ontario is such a large market and the opening of any market results in bonus offerings attracting fraudsters. This, coupled with the traditional gray market operations in Canada, resulted in experienced fraudsters hunting bonuses from day one, as anyone with a set of stolen identities could collect bonuses from several operators.

Danny DiRienzo

DiRienzo concluded that GeoComply will continue to vigilantly protect the Ontarian iGaming market from fraud.