The rise of online fraud: How to stay safe when iGaming

Research has found online fraud may affect as many as one in 10 of us, making fraud 20 times more likely than robbery. It’s thought that instances of fraud may have been severely underreported, identifying the problem as significantly more widespread and acute than was initially thought.

The importance of taking measures to stay safe online cannot be understated and one effective way to achieve this is to place barriers of some sort between fraudsters and your finances. The advice is to always use trusted payment methods when paying for anything and to avoid ever handing over your bank details.

Online casinos and security

Casinos have made popular targets for scammers, with many of them operating without regulation or oversight. For that reason, a PayPal casino is a safer option than one that only accepts a debit card.

As a reputable online payment service, PayPal has security measures in place to tackle transactions that aren’t honoured by either party, and your money is safeguarded to an extent, depending on their terms and conditions. If you have been a victim of fraud, can prove it, and have paid for the product or service via PayPal, there is a strong likelihood you will be able to recoup your losses—but it’s crucial to always read the small print.

Contrastingly, if you consent to a payment via bank transfer, there is very little protection in place and it may transpire that those funds are irretrievable.

How to avoid scams

There are simple steps that can be taken to help avoid scams in the first place, especially when iGaming. This includes:

• Watch out for websites with cheap domain names like .biz or .net and .info.
• Don’t follow links from spam email that you receive.
• Look out for spelling mistakes and hastily put together content — illegitimate websites are temporary and thrown together without care. Their purpose is to catch the truly vulnerable and so often display a poor attention to detail.
• Avoid offers that seem too good to be true. People in financial difficulty are more susceptible to sham proposals designed to collect your credit card details; the old adage holds up that if it seems too good to be true, it often is.

Other areas of fraud

John Flatley, the head of crime and analysis at the Office for National Statistics in the UK said, “up until recently statistics have relied largely on figures that have been reported to the police through the National Fraud Reporting Centre”. He goes on to stress, “they know this has only ever offered part of the picture because the majority of frauds are never reported”.

The true scale of fraud is massive, especially compared to more traditional crimes with banking and credit card misuse making up the largest proportion of those figures — as much as two thirds of the total volume of scams. Card cloning and card details being hacked and used fraudulently are still the biggest problems.

Investment fraud also proved to be another problem. In these schemes, people are offered financial opportunities by telephone or email that turn out to be bogus but are only found out to be such after significant sums have been sent so that these fabricated funds can be released. Many similar problems can be avoided following the same guidelines to avoid iGaming scams.

While scams can and are sent in all languages, by far the most common found was scams in English. Such is the attraction of the wealth of the West, consisting largely of native English speakers, that scammers from a variety of countries will focus their efforts on English scams. As a result, one tool in identifying scams can be checking for grammar and spelling that looks like it may have been written by someone whose first language is not English.

How to know if you’ve been scammed

If you’ve been a victim of online fraud, you may not even realise it until you notice unfamiliar transactions on your account or you receive a call from your bank saying they have identified suspicious activity. This can happen weeks or months after the initial details have been obtained — but usually it happens relatively quickly.

Roughly 8 out of 10 victims of credit card fraud specifically have reported they were reimbursed in full by their financial services provider following the incident. However, it’s important to remember that these costs are not invisible and are passed on indirectly to the customers in some form or another. For instance, it is well documented that the increased level of insurance fraud that has occurred over the last decade has resulted in increased insurance premiums for everyone. Fraud is not a victimless crime and tackling it will help to reduce costs across society.

While much can be done to tackle the perpetrators, educating the public on ways to avoid becoming a victim of online fraud is paramount in reducing these figures. For many, the internet is still a new tool, especially for the elderly, and campaigns to teach basic online security to vulnerable groups will represent a big step forward.

While statistics for many types of crime are on the decline, even in areas where police funding has been reduced, online fraud does seem to be one illicit activity that is thriving. It could be argued that crime in some way has shifted from the streets to the web but if you follow these simple steps, you can greatly reduce your risk of falling foul of it.