'Gambling DNA' helps fight online fraud - tech - 05 March 2008 - New Scientist
Poker players try to read the faces of their opponents - now software is about to do something similar in a bid to stem fraud against poker websites.
Like online banks, web-based casinos suffer phishing attacks: players' identities are stolen through emails purporting to be from the casino but actually from fraudsters trying to obtain account details. If successful, they then empty the account by losing the victim's money gambling against themselves or accomplices. Other crooks use software agents, or bots, which play automatically, often beating all but the best players.
To ensure a human, and the correct human at that, is playing, Roman Yampolskiy of the University at Buffalo in New York and his colleague Venu Govindaraju have written software that monitors how you play. It catalogues how often and how much a player tends to bet, increases the bet, bets everything, or folds - giving up altogether. This information is bundled up into a personalised measure - the player's "gambling DNA" - that can then be used to confirm their identity. Any deviation from that behaviour is flagged up as suspicious. After just an hour of play, Yampolskiy says, the software can authenticate players with 80 per cent accuracy - and that gets better the longer they play.
While such a scheme could protect rank-and-file players, Jonathan Schaeffer of the University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group in Edmonton, Canada, doubts it would work with the best ones. "If you are predictable, you can be exploited," he says. "Strong players try not to be predictable."
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