While AI offers many benefits to online gamblers and the world in general, bad actors are using it to launder money, target at-risk communities, and bypass security measures that safeguard your account balance. Read on to learn more.
The online gambling industry has always been on the cutting edge of new technology and innovation. While it seems a no-brainer today, early casino software engineers took a massive leap of faith that internet gambling would become widely adopted. Most homes barely had computers, and mobile technology was relegated to pushing the green button to answer a call and the red button to end it.
Not to mention that internet speeds in the 1990s averaged around 56 kbps - a far cry from today, where Europe aims to have at least 100 Mbps in all households, with France and Iceland targeting 200 Mbps.
Naturally, when the internet moved past the wild times created by the advent of blockchain and Bitcoin, which thankfully gave us crypto casinos and crash games, the next big movement to hit the tech scene was the launch of ChatGPT.
When OpenAI released its now-popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, it turned the world on its head. Built on the company’s large language model (LLM), ChatGPT was able to engage with people in a natural way, no need for specifically scripted phrases like those that search engines require.
Simply post your idea or question, and the AI will bring you back data and insights that it believes match your need. And even then, it was able to “learn your style”, bringing you better results the more you engaged with it.
The potential applications for this in business, technology, coding, and casino game development were endless.
We have gone into incredible detail previously discussing how AI could revolutionise how we gamble online, including the creation of AI-powered casinos where every aspect of your experience is personalised.
As with any emerging technology, there will always be those bad actors who use it for illicit personal gain and try to outmanoeuvre the system when it benefits them.
This has been the case recently in the United Kingdom, where, more than anywhere else in the world, there has been a sharp increase in the use of deepfake AI and face-swapping technology to commit crime.
Speaking to Sky News about the problem, Dr Jessica Barker, co-founder of Cygenta, said:
"We've seen journalists, and broadcasters in particular, being targeted with deepfakes. A trusted voice is more likely to be impersonated."
You'll find many humorous clips on social media where people use face-swapping apps to fool their kids or loved ones into thinking they've shaved their heads or to distort faces into comical expressions.
The dark side of this social media trend is when thieves and conmen use the same “fun” technology to bypass security checks, proof of ownership calls, and other forms of due diligence. Once these processes have been essentially “hacked”, they expose unwitting victims to identity theft, financial crimes or worse.
The use of this emerging technology to innovate new ways to circumvent anti-money laundering (AML) processes and fund terrorism and organised crime is becoming such a problem that the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) has discussed it publicly.
Speaking with Sky News, where their reporters had been deepfaked into videos promoting unlicensed casinos and other dubious apps, UKGC CEO Andrew Rhodes commented that these unscrupulous app providers were using AI-generated content and faked celebrity endorsements to make false claims about high-value bonuses and progressive jackpots.
These sites are unlicensed and therefore offer players no protection against deposit and payout abuse, no evaluation tools, or self-exclusion processes. They are designed exclusively to scam casino players out of their money.
Using this AI technology to attract players is only one side of the coin. The other, equally insidious side is how it is being used to expose flaws in critical safety and security processes employed by all licensed online casinos and sports betting sites.
Being a digital industry, fraud and risk assessments used to rely on users sending in photos and scans of documents to prove a source of income, account ownership, and other important personal information. However, as photo editing advanced, the most obvious step up was to rely on videos of the same and in some cases, live video interviews. These interviews allowed the casino to verify someone's identity, check for biometric cues, and gauge a person's intentions - much like the “what are your plans” questions asked at an airport when entering a country. The question is less important than being able to check the person for subtle clues that something might be off.
However, with the advancements in AI and deepfakes, it is becoming more challenging to determine id the person you see on the screen is real or a high-end faceswap used to obfuscate criminal intent.
Far from being a “chink in the armour”, this is fast becoming a major system vulnerability that needs to be addressed by the gambling industry worldwide.
As the battle for industry security advances, operators, auditors, and licensing commissions are turning to AI to help combat the rise of harmful technology. With the rapid development of new apps and generative AI, these key industry players have no choice but to adopt a “fight fire with fire” approach to security and fraud prevention.
With its superior insight into what is being displayed, new screening apps are programmed to seek out signs of deepfake tampering like pixel structure, light reflection, or blink patterns. By running evaluations and interviews on custom platforms, rather than public ones like Skype, Teams, or WhatsApp, these apps can monitor how the user is engaging with the site by looking at things like typing rhythms, error corrections, and mouse movements to determine if they are human or robotic.
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