British bookmaker William Hill is increasing its focus to cut back on fraud committed on the company's sports betting website.
United Kingdom's second largest betting group is hoping a partnership wth software provider TrustMark will help curb the number of illegal transactions conducted on the site.
Trustmark's software, RiskGuardian, allows operators to run checks on a host of variables to determine how risky the transaction is.
William Hill was able to take advantage of its popular brand throughout Europe and the United Kingdom when it opened its online sportsbook in Antigua. In addition to attracting plenty of U.K. punters who were interested in laying down a couple of pounds on the biggest Premiership game of the week, it also attracted plenty of scammers and fraudulent users.
With TrustMark on their side, though, William Hill officials are hoping to identify fraudulent users before any winnings are paid out to them. The company is hoping the new alliance with TrustMark will save it thousands of pounds per year.
Ian Feather, risk manager at William Hill, said that although fraud levels aren't killing the bottom line, the company wanted to take measures before things got too out of control.
"It's a serious threat," he said. "We are very aware of it and very switched on. It's not got out of hand so far, but we want to stay ahead of the game."
RiskGuardian runs every individual online transaction against 53 separate checks, including time, IP address, delivery address, credit card origin and e-mail address. The transaction is given a risk score from zero to 100.
A score at the bottom of the scale is considered very safe, but those near the top of the chart are marked as untrustworthy and can be refused by the company.
TrustMark officials said the new software wasn't easy to establish, but Peter Angell, senior vice president at the company, feels the product could be in high demand with other operators now that William Hill is tapping into it.
"There are lots of very clever people all over the world that at the click of a button can try to create a fraudulent transaction," he said. "It can be anyone from an experienced Russian hacker to a regular British punter who loses money and then panics. We have to cover all aspects."
William Hill has not yet decided what the threshold will be for refusing a transaction.
"It's one thing stopping fraud, but at the same time we are a business and we don't want to reject a good transaction," said Feather.