iGaming Industry Fights Back Against Bonus Abuse with AI

The iGaming industry is facing a significant challenge with bonus abuse, which has seen a 63.8% year-on-year growth on average between 2022 and 2024. This issue has become a major concern, with around 15% of promotional budgets leaking directly to abusers. Traditional rule-based systems, such as IP blocks, device limits, wagering thresholds, and one-bonus-per-account policies, are no longer sufficient to combat these sophisticated tactics.

Modern bonus abusers employ techniques such as rotating IPs, randomizing device fingerprints, spoofing user agents, and spreading activity across multiple accounts that appear clean in isolation. These methods make it difficult for traditional systems to detect abuse effectively. Static rules, while still useful for enforcing fixed policy boundaries and providing immediate levers during live promotions, struggle to keep up with the evolving tactics of bonus abusers.

AI/ML systems offer a more robust solution by creating relationship graphs across accounts, devices, and behaviors. These systems learn what legitimate players look like across different segments and flag deviations that no single rule would catch. They also reduce false positives, ensuring that fewer legitimate players are blocked and fraud teams can focus on real cases. EveryMatrix’s Bonus Guardian is an example of an AI-powered tool that uses behavioral analysis to detect coordinated abuse, operating alongside the policy guardrails that operators already have in place.