5 Identity Insights for Gaming Operators

Spend enough time looking across Australia’s wagering ecosystem and a pattern starts to emerge: fraud isn’t simply becoming more sophisticated; it’s becoming more connected. The payment card changes. The device changes. The email changes. Sometimes even the customer appears to change. But the identity behind those interactions often doesn’t.

That’s why the industry’s center of gravity is shifting, from analyzing transactions to understanding identities. As AI accelerates both customer innovation and organized fraud, that shift is becoming impossible to ignore. Drawing on intelligence from Forter’s Gaming & Betting Network, including Australian wagering activity and a broader global identity network spanning more than 2.5 billion identities, here are five observations every wagering executive should be thinking about.

Identity has become the decision, not the transaction

For years, fraud decisions started with the transaction. Increasingly, that’s the least interesting part.

Fraudsters move effortlessly between payment methods, devices, email addresses, and operators. Looking at any one event only tells part of the story. Identity connects those events, providing the historical context that allows operators to distinguish genuine customers from organized abuse.

Forter already recognizes 97% of identities across Australia, the US, Canada, and Ireland. Combined with a global identity network of more than 2.5 billion identities, operators are no longer limited to what they’ve seen on their own platform. Even when a bad actor first appears outside Australia’s primary wagering markets, there is often already a history associated with that identity.

AI is helping both operators and fraudsters

Much of the industry’s AI conversation focuses on productivity. Fraudsters are becoming more productive, too: credential stuffing, synthetic identities, account takeover, coordinated abuse. These attacks are becoming faster, cheaper, and easier to scale.

The average fraudster in Forter’s gaming network targets 5.5 different gaming operators every year, demonstrating that organized attacks are already operating at scale. At the same time, AI agents are increasingly becoming part of legitimate customer experiences, from monitoring odds to executing betting strategies.

The challenge isn’t detecting automation. It’s understanding who’s behind it.

Bonus abuse has gone from opportunistic to organized: multi-accounting, bot-driven registration, affiliate abuse, arbitrage betting. These aren’t isolated incidents, they’re repeatable business models.

Forter’s research indicates that more than 65% of fraud and abuse methods in betting involve multi-account creation or account takeover. The commercial implication is significant: operators shouldn’t have to choose between growing aggressively and protecting promotions. When identity is understood with confidence, acquisition offers can reach genuine new customers while organized abuse is stopped before it erodes profitability.

The biggest opportunity is approving more customers rather than stopping fraud

This is where many fraud conversations miss the point. Every unnecessary decline, every manual review, and every extra authentication step creates friction for a genuine customer. In wagering, that friction is amplified: a one-second delay can mean the odds move, the market closes, or the customer simply places their bet elsewhere. The lost transaction is only part of the cost. The larger cost is the customer who never comes back.

The operators creating the most value aren’t necessarily declining more transactions. They’re confidently approving more of the right ones. Across Forter’s largest gaming customers, the commercial upside from incremental approvals is approximately 12 times greater than the value preserved through declining fraudulent transactions.

Fraud prevention stops being about saying “no.” It becomes knowing exactly when you can confidently say “yes.”

Trust is becoming Australia’s next competitive advantage

Nearly half of high-risk gaming identities are connected across multiple merchants. Forter’s analysis also found that more than 40% were linked to activity outside gaming altogether. Organized fraud doesn’t respect operator boundaries, or industry boundaries. No individual operator sees the full picture, but network intelligence changes that.

When trust decisions are informed by identity rather than isolated transactions, operators can approve more genuine customers instantly, reduce unnecessary authentication and manual reviews, protect promotional investment, identify organized fraud earlier, and increase customer lifetime value, not just today’s conversion.

Australian wagering has always been one of the world’s most sophisticated betting markets. As AI reshapes both customer expectations and criminal behavior, the industry’s challenge is changing. It’s no longer simply “How do we stop more fraud?” It’s becoming “How confidently can we recognize and approve our genuine customers?”

For the operators that get this right, fraud prevention becomes more than a defensive capability. It becomes a growth engine: protecting revenue, reducing friction, and building customer trust in the moments that matter.

See how leading wagering operators are using identity intelligence to approve more genuine customers, reduce promotional abuse, and prepare for the next era of AI-driven commerce.