Chapter 4: Customer engagement
Typical ways for a digital sportsbook to protect itself and players include:
applying deposit limits
locking suspicious player accounts
knowing the customer - watching for irregular patterns
taking details of an active credit card
having age verification in place
introducing security steps such as waiting for an activation code to arrive by e-mail and having to
provide proof of identification with a valid passport or driving licence.
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Technology security firm Akamai has warned that the digital gambling industry is the biggest target
for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, with the market accounting for 50% of all attacks in the
third quarter of 2015.
According to Akamai’s latest ‘State of the Internet’ report published in December 2015, total DDoS
attacks were up 180% year-on-year during the third quarter, with digital gambling the main target.
DDoS attackers overload a website’s bandwidth with hundreds or thousands of simultaneous requests,
which renders it temporarily non-operational and allows the attackers to hold the site to ransom.
Websites are only able to resume normal operation once the ransom has been paid or if the security
team can fend of the attack.
Betfair, PokerStars, Unibet and Svenska Spel are among the industry brands that have been targeted in
the past 12 months.
John Summers, vice president of Akamai, said: “Akamai has been seeing greater numbers of denial of
service attacks every quarter, and the upward trend continued in the most recent quarter. Although
recent DDoS attacks were on average smaller and shorter, they still posed a significant cloud security
risk.”
4.2.4 Offers, bonuses and promotions
Consumer demand has added to increasing competition in the sports betting marketplace across all
platforms and has put further pressure on the odds offered by operators and as a consequence has
greatly benefited consumer choice and value.
The most important single motivator for playing at a particular gaming site according to auditor
eCogra research is its bonuses (75%), followed by game variety (62%), deposit method and reputation
(both 56%) and then promptness of payouts (54%).
Many sportsbooks offer bonuses just like digital casinos do. Like casino bonuses, these sportsbook
bonuses can be used as ‘a tool’ of advantage gambling. Sports betting bonuses actually offer a way to
make money with less risk than casino bonuses, where variance can be quite a big factor.
Most of the sportsbooks that offer bonuses and rewards let their customers use the bonus when they
meet the rollover/play through requirements. Rollover simply means that the customer has to bet for x
times before they can get the bonus. Certain sportsbooks will set rollover as x times bonus and deposit
money to claim the bonus. This implicitly means that the customer cannot withdraw the additional
benefit and they have to use the bonus money to wager more. The rewards are generally treated as
means for encouraging the customers to continue gambling.
100 Digital Sports Betting