As technology progresses in the world of online gambling, the risk of danger increases as well. Whereas most ways to cheat have been caught, accounted for and adjusted to prevent, the majority of these solutions are limited in preventing players from cheating the casinos. There are, in addition, risks to the players as well. As if sending your finances electronically out of the country weren’t dangerous enough, the same scams that exist for physical credit cards and identity theft in the real world exist on the internet, too.

Recently, a new form of damaging software has been discovered that all should be aware of. Essentially, online bad guys are stealing gamblers’ information via email scams and using the information to log on to the casino websites as the player, and run them bankrupt. The intention is not to steal the cash, but rather play on stolen accounts until the money no longer exists, and has been lost to the casino.

There is, however, a possible prevention. Roman Yampolskiy and Venu Govindadju, of the University of Buffalo in New York are coming up with counter software in order to battle such attacks on personal data. Their program tracks the ways that players play on online casinos, memorizing trends into what they are referring to as “player DNA.” Information such as how often and how much you tend to bet, raises and folds help them create a player profile.

The profile is then used so that websites can tell whether it is truly you playing, or someone else on your account. Once the program knows how you tend to gamble, any activity on your account that differs from your personal strategy and habits will be flagged to site administrators as suspicious, alerting them to the possibility of fraud. The creators say that once the computer has you in its memory, one hour of playtime is enough information for the software to verify playership with an amazing 80% accuracy. The more you play, i.e. the longer you are actively online, the higher the accuracy becomes.

There are of course, the possible downfalls of the new program. Especially at the more expert levels of play, being unexpected is the exact strategy needed to win games and money. Summarizing the point, “If you are predictable, you can be exploited. Strong players try not to be predictable,” says University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group spokesperson, Jonathan Schaeffer.

There is also the danger of the program being used not as a preventative tool, but rather a way for casinos or other players to predict the way a gambler will play- thus allowing them a great advantage, and cheating against said gambler. Its currently recommended that increasing security at log-on pages would be a simple way of catching identity thieves, similarly to the measures taken at financials and credit card companies.