How Does Web Scraping Affect the Gambling Industry?

Web scraping and arbitrage betting (arb betting) are some of the top automated threats to the betting industry.

What is web scraping in gambling?

Web scraping is an automated technique for extracting various types of information from websites, such as betting odds, content and prices, dependent on the attacker’s objective. Bots gather this valuable data from your site to be used elsewhere without your consent.

Scraping is the root cause of unauthorised and malicious activity on sports booking and casino sites.

It can be difficult to measure the impact of scraping, as the intention of the activity is not always immediately clear. Methods of scraping have become highly sophisticated, making it important for businesses to stop scraper bots in their tracks.

What is odds scraping?

Scraping is a common automated technique in a lot of industries however, it can have a damaging impact on a business if used with bad intent. Good scraping bot activity includes content aggregation or content scraping that’s used to help market products and services.

Once attackers have scraped the odds data they need, arb-betting bots are used to simultaneously place bets on all possible outcomes of an event at odds that guarantee a profit. Bots are commonly used by aggregators to enable automated arb-betting.

Why is odds scraping a problem?

Not only does odds scraping mean that bookmakers could lose money due to increased pay-outs to arb betters, but careless or irresponsible scrapers could send thousands of bots to gambling sites simultaneously, leading to slow site speeds and perhaps even preventing genuine users from accessing your site.

Bot management for bookmakers with Netacea

Here at Netacea, our blocking strategy targets arb-bots by identifying arbing patterns and scraping. Our innovative bot management solutions can be implemented to automatically block the worst volumetric scrapers creating faster response times.