Gaming – The Red Hot Vertical

Gaming has become one of the fastest growing bandwidth segments in recent years due to the rapid online adoption of Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) and social games. The NTT GIN group sent a team to the Austin Game Developers Conference (GDC) from September 15-18 to research and meet customers in this red hot vertical. One of the more interesting takeaways from the show was the new focus on gaming fraud and charge backs.

Publishers and gaming companies are quickly getting up to speed on gaming fraud because the real costs are mounting up fast. A major method of fraud carried out by fraudsters is creating multiple accounts and buying virtual goods with stolen credit cards. To add insult to harm, they sell these virtual goods on third party sites, cutting the publisher out on revenues, and then charge it all back, creating a double hit to the bottom line. Enter the need for real time fraud detection and prevention.

Instead of building in-house fraud management solutions, publishers are looking to outside vendors who have expertise in combating fraudsters. A primary reason for going this route is to save on the capital it costs to build these complex systems. Furthermore, this allows them to utilize the economies of scale gained by working with a company that can share fraud characteristics like known fraudulent devices among several different companies doing money based transactions over the Internet. 

We learned a lot of great information from the iovation inc. team, a leading provider of fraud detection and prevention, and felt it would be informative to pass this along to our customers and partners that focus in the gaming segment.  Moreover, any company (social networking, banking, retail, etc.) that completes online financial transactions would stand to gain by educating themselves on this rapidly evolving threatscape. Making sure our customers realize potential dangers and know that we are an active participant in raising their awareness level, is one way of showing how NTT America goes beyond being an Internet transit carrier and demonstrates our serious dedication to customer service.







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