One of the main reasons people use multiple accounts on the same platform is to separate their public and private lives. While having multiple accounts has benefits in this context, it has some negative implications in others. Regarding gaming services, multiple accounts are negative and pose certain risks for fraudulent activities.
It is not uncommon for some users to sell their accounts, share resources, abuse promos and try to get advantages unfairly.
If you have just learned what multi-accounting is, we will discuss it in this article, its potential risks and why gamers opt to create multiple accounts.
What is Multi-Accounting
In simple words, multi-accounting is when a person signs up for more than one account with the same service.
For quick pay online casinos, this circumvention comes with high costs. Firstly, multi-accounting affects their revenues – gamers creating several accounts can use them for fraudulent purposes like taking advantage of platform bonuses or joining with other criminals to launder money. This naturally leads to fraud losses. In addition, online casinos are often required to follow various policies and regulations. These may cover age verification, responsible gambling practices, and self-exclusion. However, multi-accounting can make it more difficult for gambling operators to enforce these measures, thus resulting in various sanctions and regulatory fines.
Secondly, and most importantly, multi-accounting can cost these sites their reputation. By opening several accounts, players can manipulate game results and unfairly benefit from their actions. This will create an unfair gaming environment for legitimate players, who will eventually lose their trust in the platform.
Multiple Accounts in Gaming
Multi-accounting can also be found in online games. There are several reasons to explain why online gamers may need to create multiple accounts:
- Promo Abuse: If attractive bonuses, such as valuable or rare tradable items, are offered to newly registered players, users can create multiple accounts to trade or share them. They can also use these to enforce their own account or stockpile the resources they collect to sell them on various third-party marketplaces. This abuse makes winning difficult for users who play the game fairly.
- Smurfing occurs when high-ranking players create so-called ‘smurf’ accounts to practice new techniques safely without affecting their high rankings. This can lead to an extremely unfair game between a strong and low-ranked player.
- Circumventing Bans: Players with a history of trolling, cheating, or griefing can circumvent bans by creating new accounts.
As you can tell, multi-accounting can create problems depending on the platform or service users target.
How To Detect and Prevent Multi-Accounting
The most optimal means of preventing multi-accounting is making it very difficult for a player to create multiple accounts. For example, this can be done through facial authentication (liveness check). This is a biometric analysis of a user’s face and facial movements to ensure the user’s real presence during the check. The first step is for the user to go through the liveness check when registering an account. In the next step, the system searches the database to determine if the user exists. Overall, advanced face authentication tools can help ensure that users are genuine individuals – and not the same person with multiple accounts.
In addition, allowing players to have only one account per email or using SSO services from Facebook or Google can reduce multi-accounting significantly.
In summary, multi-accounting prevention needs flexible and secure verification to satisfy users who play fairly while fraudsters and bonus hunters are kept at bay.
Even though not all multi-accounting is fraudulent, gaming operators can still use many advanced tools and solutions to decide whether to stop or keep it.
