Paf, a major online gaming provider for Northern Europe, has joined Ethoca’s global Fraud-Fighting community to strengthen its security levels and industry standing. Paf offers poker, slots, casino games, betting, bingo and online lotteries to the Scandinavian and Northern European market, and their alliance with Ethoca comes as part of their expansion plans into the rest of the continent.
While Paf’s security levels were already of a high enough level to prevent major breaches of security, they had been faced recently with a high incidence of “chip dumping,” which is when a player loses intentionally to give his or her chips to another player. While this in and of itself does not necessarily affect other players in the way collusion does, it is still a breach of a site’s integrity and a misuse of its resources. Marko Hietala, Head of Fraud and Forensics for Paf, declared:”As a gaming company, fraud is far more than a chargeback. It is any unwanted activity that threatens our bottom line and impacts the integrity of the environment of our loyal players. Paf has been building a powerful internal fraud team to tackle these activities and we see Ethoca as the perfect partner to keep chip dumping at bay.”
Ethoca provides a network for fraud managers in e-commerce and other remote-customer activities which enables all of its members to tap into a “collective pool of member-provided payment experience information.” This gives members the possibility to make more informed decisions and to learn from the experience of other providers in order to regulate their own transactions.
As a large gaming company, Paf processes hundreds of thousands of transactions every day – for an annual turnover of Euro 106 million and annual profits of Euro 42 million – which puts it at a great risk of being a target for fraud, and as it plans to expand into the rest of Europe it is crucial that Paf’s fraud prevention systems and team are up to the task, and that they meet the varying requirements of the different European countries. Ethoca’s CEO Andre Edelbrock explained why this alliance will benefit Paf: “Most fraud management practices involve a one-step decision making process that evaluates the company’s own experiences. But this should be a two-step process that incorporates the payment experiences of others as well. Paf is among the leaders in the gaming industry that have realized fraud prevention should not be done alone and this is precisely where Ethoca shines. Ethoca can help companies improve checks against their own experiences but what makes the community so unique is the complete knowledge it provides from the experiences of others.”
