Mykhailo Zborovskyi Cosmobet (formerly brand owner), expert in iGaming product development
Registrations are growing, bonuses are being actively cleared, user engagement on the charts is creeping up. The problem is that more and more often a significant part of this activity is not real players, but industrially organized fraud, which looks statistically indistinct and almost indistinguishable from a regular user until the income evaporates.
From individual abuse to industry
According to Mykhailo Zborovskyi, the key change in recent years is the transition from opportunistic fraud to organized crime. At the beginning of his career, the risks were mostly individual, bonus abuse here, a controversial chargeback there, unpleasant, but local.
Today, fraud has become networked, data-driven, and in many cases is a full-fledged operation with its own tools, infrastructure, and business logic. That is, it is no longer a single person who is working against the operator, but a competing organization with its own product cycle.
Why Fraud Under Control is a Dangerous Illusion
The most common mistake is to take stable chargebacks and flat KPIs as evidence that the fraud situation is stable.
In reality, this is only the surface layer. Modern iGaming fraud is structural, and operators lose money in ways that do not appear as direct fraudulent losses at all.
Fake users inflate new customer acquisition metrics. Bonus abusers distort the ROI of marketing campaigns. Real players leave because overly strict security measures create unnecessary friction and distrust where there was no real risk.
A figure that changes the perception of the scale of the problem
Research shows that bonus abuse alone accounts for over 60% of all iGaming fraud, quietly eating up to 15% of an operator’s annual revenue, through poor data, fake customer retention and wasted marketing budget.
This is not a shadowy expense item hidden somewhere in a risk management report. This is 15% of annual revenue that the company simply never sees, because it is dissolved in marketing budgets and indicators that look completely healthy.
When a growth spurt turns out to be a bot farm
According to Mykhailo Zborovskyi, he has repeatedly seen operators accept growth spurts for a strong quarter, only to discover a few months later that a significant proportion of new users were actually fraud networks that farmed bonuses or manipulated VIP schemes.
This is the insidiousness of such fraud. It is intentionally made to appear statistically vague, meaning that each individual fake account behaves sufficiently like a real player to avoid attracting the attention of traditional transactional security systems designed to look for obvious anomalies rather than network patterns.
The material is for informational purposes only and is not advice on specific security systems or financial decisions.
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