Challenges
- New customers expect a user-friendly and secure process to create their account and deposit funds, so PointsBet needed an additional layer of defense with visibility into automated bot activity around the registration process and payment gateway.
- Botnets with tens of thousands of IPs ran slowly enough to evade typical solutions that key on user agents and IP addresses.
- Traditional bot mitigation would require ongoing maintenance and resources, pulling the team away from product development.
Results
- Achieve real-time detection and defense against automated bots and botnets.
- Ensure that only legitimate users can register and make transactions by identifying and stopping bots.
- Gain actionable insights with granular data from both humans and bad bots.
- Expand into new markets with flexible and scalable protection from automated threats and botnet attacks.
- Increase conversion rates through a simple onboarding process that invisibly verifies legitimate users, without CAPTCHAs.
- Stop bot operators attempting to abuse credentials and impact credit card fraud and the payment gateway.
- Improve the digital customer journey with cleaner web and mobile metrics.
- Improve the responsiveness of website and mobile app by eliminating bot traffic that slows down infrastructure processing.
- Easily manage bots without manual intervention or rules to manage.
PointsBet, founded in Australia with US headquarters in Denver, Colorado, is a cutting-edge, digital sports betting and technology company. PointsBet is one of the fastest growing operators in the industry, seeking to offer more markets on NBA, AFL, and NRL than any other bookmaker in the world. PointsBet prides itself in owning its proprietary technology, which allows the company to innovate more quickly and provide an outstanding experience across every customer touchpoint.
A key challenge for online bookmakers is preventing fraud while providing a frictionless user experience. Maintaining control over critical online assets and ensuring the authenticity of traffic without compromising the customer journey are constant concerns. Defending valuable data against account takeover and bot attacks has become essential to succeeding in today’s digital environment.
The Pain
The ability for customers to easily onboard is a critical component for PointsBet, as new customers expect a user-friendly and secure process to create their account and deposit funds.
We’re very selective in terms of how we protect our endpoints. These are very sensitive because we don’t want to miss any single client from signing up with us or not being able to deposit due to the fact that we might be under a bot attack.
— Nik Pinchuk, Global Head of Engineering, PointsBet
PointsBet wanted to get more granular visibility into automated activity. “We saw botnets with tens of thousands of IPs involved. It’s very slow running. You wouldn’t be able to catch it with more typical solutions when user agents and IP addresses are different.”
For us, it’s absolutely critical to not have any visible customer flow interventions, be it things like reCAPTCHAs or challenge pages, or anything like that. In the entertainment industry in general, and in betting, customers literally would abandon a registration process purely just because they have one extra step or five seconds to wait for a challenge page to disappear. Our advanced front-end architecture relies on unobtrusive ways of detecting legitimate users. 99.9% is API traffic, originated from either the mobile web application or mobile app.
— Nik Pinchuk, Global Head of Engineering, PointsBet
The Solution
PointsBet knew that traditional bot mitigation solutions would require maintenance and resources on their end. They wanted to have their team focused on product development and innovation instead, so they turned to Kasada.
Traditional bot management systems need to be actively tuned. We don’t have anyone in PointsBet actively managing Kasada or tuning or adjusting rules. We focus that effort somewhere else. We never had to worry about botnet mitigation for the endpoints protected by Kasada. That was always handled by the Kasada team, which is great.
— Nik Pinchuk, Global Head of Engineering, PointsBet
It’s very important for us to have someone who we can count on. If we double or triple our US presence in additional locations, we know that Kasada can keep up, and we don’t need to look for another solution to cover different geographical locations or deliver at a greater scale.
— Nik Pinchuk, Global Head of Engineering, PointsBet
