Inside Social Games

Fraud has always been one of the biggest challenges of any payment system online. In fact, just last month, even the Washington Post commented that amongst the chief security risks today were payments around virtual goods.

Given that many free-to-play MMOs and online games are based on virtual currency monetization, Offerpal, one of the leading monetization platforms for social apps and online games, is releasing a new automated fraud monitoring system called “OfferpalSECURE” to step up the fight back.

The goal of the system, like any anti-fraud service, is to reduce developer and consumer losses due to fraudulent payment activity. Offerpal says the new system, combined with data from Offerpal’s 200 million transactions to date and in-house fraud analyst staff, have reduced fraud rates for publishers by over 60%. Offerpal says the new system improves on previous versions by adding secure hash signatures, detection of irregular patterns in user behavior, and machine fingerprinting.

Marcus Eikenberry, Founder and CEO of TrustWho, estimates that fraud rates for online games that don’t even allow player-to-player transfers are around 10%. Virtual currency monetization platforms like Offerpal, Super Rewards, Peanut Labs, TrialPay, and others are continuing to work night and day to ensure that rates stay as low as possible to enable to space to continue to flourish.