How Online Casinos Detect Suspicious Activity
Online casinos are a fun and convenient way to enjoy gaming without leaving your house. But what happens when your account is shut down for suspicious activity? What exactly did the casino deem suspicious and why?
Online casinos use computer programs, employees, and AI to detect suspicious activity such as cheating, kingmaking, and other gameplay tactics that are against their terms of service. Read on to learn more about how online casinos detect suspicious activity.
What is Suspicious Activity in an Online Casino?
If your account has recently been banned, you might wonder why. The reality is that there is no one reason you may be banned from an online casino. While casinos do have laws to follow, they are also private businesses, meaning they can close your account for any reason.
That being said, they do sometimes make mistakes, and in these cases, as long as you haven’t done any of the following, you may be able to ask for your account to be restored. Suspicious activity includes illegal play (such as playing from a prohibited country), cheating, fraud, and kingmaking—all of which probably won’t allow you to have your account back.
But if you have looked into your local laws and know you should be allowed to play, and can prove you weren’t using someone else’s card, cheating, using bots, or kingmaking, then it may be worth it to ask for your account back. Do note that some online casinos have additional rules you may have violated, so it might be a good idea to check the specific rules and terms of service, for the site you were banned from before you contact customer service.
How Online Casinos Detect Suspicious Activity
1. Computer Programs
Gambling is one of the oldest pastimes, and as such, there are a lot of studies to how people gamble. These studies have been used to create computer programs to flag when someone is playing outside of the norms.
While the norms will vary from game to game, note that these aren’t just used in online casinos. Even brick-and-mortar casinos have machines watching your play, and if you are winning too much, too little, or are exhibiting behavior outside of a baseline, your account will be flagged for review. Although many casinos rely on in-person review of these accounts, some auto-cancel players caught by their program. In these cases, it might be possible to get your account back if you can prove you were just playing.
In our experience, reinstatement of an account is quite rare, and it is also rare at in-person casinos to be invited back after being banned. But it does happen on occasion.
2. Employees
Brick-and-mortar casinos aren’t the only casinos that use people as their front line for spotting problem players. While it is a little easier to spot out of the norm behavior in person, there are many people around the world paid to watch online casino logs to watch for suspicious activity.
We will say that it is typically the larger and more popular casinos which have money for this type of monitoring, but it does happen, especially at online sports books like Draft Kings.
There are typically fewer accidental account bans when human power is used, but it still can happen. In these cases, however, we highly doubt you will have any luck getting your account back because you’re not up against a computer program that can’t talk back—you’re up against a person who can say exactly why they banned you.
3. AI Programs
Many online casinos have begun using AI to monitor gambling activity and to flag anything suspicious. Because AI is still new, both brick-and-mortar and online casinos typically still funnel this information through at least one human check before making account deletions and bans.
Unfortunately, though, there are many online casinos which think AI is the be all, end all, and these sites often have customers finding themselves banned for reasons they don’t understand. Although AI is less trusted than the old computer programs, or should be, some casino owners rely on it heavily when they shouldn’t.
What’s even more sad, is many of these types of bans are equally as difficult to undo—not just because of the over trust in AI, but because AI can automatically sever an account in a way which makes it a challenge to recover it.
We also want to mention that using a casino that heavily uses AI isn’t the safest because AI takes in a lot of data. If a casino cannot explain to you where the data the AI is fed goes, it’s probably better to skip it, as your personal information could be fed to somewhere you would rather it not be. (Also note that in some countries, AI in the casino business is prohibited for this exact reason).
What to Do if Your Account is Banned
No matter the reason, if you’ve been banned from an online casino, your first step is to find out why. Sometimes the reason is listed in the ban notice you received. If not, try contacting customer service.
If they state the ban is for suspicious activity, that is where this article comes in. If you know you haven’t done anything illegal or against the casino rules, it might be worthwhile to see about the possibility of getting your account back. But if you have broken their rules, don’t bother trying; it’s better to find a different casino with rules you can follow while gambling.
Overall, an account ban from an online casino is never fun, but it can possibly be reversed. Just know that casinos use a mix of computer programming, humans, and AI to find people who may be breaking their rules, and if you are caught cheating or committing fraud, you will never be invited back—no matter what you try.
