LocationSmart, the Carlsbad, California-based leader in location-based services, has announced the upcoming release of enhanced IP Intelligence and Device Profiling features of their online transaction verification and gaming/lottery compliance services. The initial release is scheduled in March and will allow limited beta access to existing customers, with progressively broader releases over the coming months, and full availability by June.
LocationSmart Meeting Higher Demand
The release of this enhanced technology comes at a time when physical casinos are experiencing a decrease in the number of customers due to the rapid spread of COVID-19 around the globe. With the desire to remain safe from the virus, many people are turning to online gaming, making the need to ensure full compliance with all online gaming regulations more relevant than ever.
In addition, many states throughout the U.S. and countries in Europe and elsewhere around the world are legalizing online gaming and lotteries. What this means is that online gaming companies require tight control on who has access to their site and can make lottery purchases and wagers. Each area in which a company operates can potentially have differing regulatory requirements, such as age, geofencing rules and how long information can be cached.
LocationSmart Technology
The enhanced capabilities make it easier than ever for online gaming companies to verify the identity and location of users. Previous to the release of this enhanced technology, LocationSmart’s services allowed companies to:
- Verify transactions inside and outside of gaming boundaries
- Extend onsite gaming to mobile and desktop
- Enable operators to comply with state or regional regulations
- Validate that purchases/wagers are made within allowed areas, but not within exclusion zones
- Use layered intelligence to verify device location and properties
While these features go a long way to ensuring access and compliance, the enhanced offering from LocationSmart comes at a crucial time in the industry. In today’s world, people who want to engage in illegal online gaming are find creative ways to try and circumvent compliance measures. People can try to make it look like they are located in a valid gaming area, even when they aren’t.
For this reason, LocationSmart is stepping up their game to offer gaming companies even more peace of mind with enhanced methods to determine a device’s location and characteristics as well as user behavior that may indicate suspicious activity. This includes:
- A four-fold increase in number of available IP data records
- Expanded availability of postal code insights
- Postal Code location confidence factor
- Estimated error radius of available location coordinates
- Record consistency factor representing temporal and content persistence of underlying data elements
- Availability of expanded data sets for both IPv4 and IPv6 records
Enhanced Device Profiling features include:
- Expanded biometrics and behavioral indicators for remote desktop and virtual machine detection
- Integration of location insights, device profiling and geofencing into a unified compliance API
- Added customization for profile rules and policies
- Updated spoofing detection utilizing global device characteristics comparisons
- Augmented multi-national reputation scoring and risk analysis
- Device configuration consistency checks
- Physical and online activity velocity validation
Ultimately, it is the responsibility of all online gaming companies to ensure they are in compliance with state and regional laws and regulations. LocationSmart is constantly striving to bring more powerful and easily accessible tools to bear for gaming operators to meet these objectives.
About LocationSmart
LocationSmart is the world’s largest LaaS provider, offering cloud-based location services to many customers, from Fortune 500 companies to start-ups. Their location-based services work across networks, platforms, and devices for a global reach of more than 200 countries.