Online casino customers want to know they are playing at a casino that protects their privacy, data and financial information. Providing this creates several challenges, but licensed UK online operators still champion security protocols and compliance.

Player trust – essential for successful gambling businesses

Financial transparency, privacy, and data protection are crucial to player security and determine whether consumers trust a gambling site. Customer trust is the litmus test of a successful gambling brand. Untrustworthy sites don’t survive long, scoring low with players and review sites. 

When considering where to play the best slots in the UK, it’s not enough for players to only look at games choice; customers also need to consider a casino’s reputation, ensuring it has up-to-date licensing, sufficient privacy terms, and state-of-the-art security features.

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Reading online reviews can help with research and is one of the easiest ways to narrow down the options. Review sites test online casinos for security, ensuring licensing and site encryption. If a gambling site consistently has terrible reviews, it’ll put prospective players off and limit its success.

Security challenges for operators

Online gambling sites in the UK are held to licensing standards and UK laws, which cover data privacy protocol (following GDPR), fraud prevention, Know Your Customer Checks, Source of Fund inquiries, Anti-Money Laundering prevention, levels of site and server security (SSL and physical considerations), secure payment gateways and methods, and more. These measures, along with game testing and certification, are created to ensure that gambling remains crime-free and that consumers are assured of the industry’s legitimacy. 

Despite the measures, the gambling industry is constantly under attack from criminal forces. In the last several years, major scale hacks have exposed the vulnerability of the global online gambling industry from a security point of view. 

These include the Betway breach in 2011 (cyber criminals accessed the consumer database), William Hill hack in 2016 (a DDoS attack that took down the site, costing millions in lost bets), the DraftKings fiasco in 2022 (that led to $600,000 being withdrawn from player accounts by a teen) and BetMGM also in 2022 (user data was breached from May-Nov, 22).

These wide-scale attacks on market-leading gambling operators remind us of the pace of tech growth and that cyber criminals pose an ongoing threat to the online gambling industry. This is why operators must invest in robust protections, software and AI and conduct regular security audits with bodies like eCOGRA to expose vulnerabilities.

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Data protection and Anti-Money Laundering laws

While some areas of regulation are the remit of the UK Gambling Commission, others, like data protection and AML compliance, are governed by separate laws. Data protection laws for personal and financial details are provided by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018). These two regulations govern how businesses and gambling operators can use, and process data, with GDPR considered the latest update. 

“Fairness, transparency, accuracy, security, data minimisation and respect for the rights of the individual whose data a business wants to process – these are all things that businesses should already be doing with data. GDPR seeks to build on those principles.”

Data protection laws and rules are complex and include details on encryption, SSL coverage, employee training in best practices, audits and testing, and data retention. UK casinos are experienced in data handling and storage protocol; they also employ the latest security software to ensure player accounts and data are kept secure. 

We’ll go more into AML below, but just to add, on financial transparency, UK gambling sites must be completely transparent and even separate player funds to ensure they are protected in cases of solvency issues. All financial records are reported to the Gambling Commission for tax purposes.

Account security

Both consumers and casinos have a role to play in account security. In line with gambling and AML laws, online casinos in the UK must complete Know Your Customer Checks on new accounts. This includes age and ID verification. It helps satisfy source of funds regulations and financial transparency; on the individual level, cases of financial fraud by players have taken place in the past. The Gambling Commission’s primary aim is ensuring gambling remains crime-free, which chiefly means avoiding money laundering efforts.

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In avoiding outside hacking efforts and to better reassure players, operators can also increase account security by using 2-factor sign-in accounts, fingerprint logins on apps and for payments, plus security questions. 

Security audits and testing

Online casinos and gambling sites can pay third-party auditing companies, like eCOGRA and iTech Labs, to test their platforms. These attack the platform to expose any areas of weakness from an outside perspective. Conducting third-party security audits is considered the best practice for online gambling operators in the UK, at least every two years.

Future of fraud detection and gambling harm indicators

Gambling operators are increasingly using AI to flag cases of suspicious account activity. It’s decreasing the space for error, especially when coupled with the UK’s new rules regarding loss limits and financial checks (these are loss, so will include targeted interventions with players who are not experiencing harm or fraud – early intervention raises awareness of harmful partners of betting).

As AI can process large data sets and uses machine learning, it is getting ever better at flagging cases of fraud and gambling harm at the individual account level. It is also instrumental in detecting bonus abuse, brute force hacking attempts and unusual payments. 

However, as the amount of data casinos process regarding players increases, so do the concerns relating to ethical uses of data, including how operators use this for targeted marketing and promotions, which, as the past has shown, has an impact on the behaviour of vulnerable players – we are of course thinking about how some UK operators used VIP schemes and promos to encourage large and unchecked spending on some accounts, which led to new Gambling Commission guidance.

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At the end of the day, where there are cases of it going wrong, for the most part, operators play it safe and do their utmost to ensure consumers can trust the UK gambling industry. This means providing the highest standard of online security, financial transparency, privacy and data protection and encouraging responsible, sustainable play.