Out Betting Bots: Scraping in The Gambling Industry

Web scraping and arbitrage betting (arb betting) are some of the top automated threats to the betting industry. We hosted a webinar along with Ozric Vondervelden, Partner at Lovelace Consultancy,  discussing the bot threats to the betting industry, exploring how bots are affecting the betting landscape, the cost to businesses and what you can do to protect your organisation.

Ozric has worked against the betting industry for many years, throughout the webinar he explains why bots are important to the betting and gaming industry and why scraper bots are a threat.

What is web scraping?

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. During the webinar, we discover how sophisticated the methods of scraping have become, and what businesses can do to stop scraper bots in their tracks.

Odds scraping in gambling

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.

Ozric explained: “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.

How Netacea helps

Here at Netacea, our blocking strategy targets arb-bots by identifying arbing patterns and scraping. We automatically block the worst volumetric scrapers creating faster response times.

If you’d like to know more about fighting back at bots and the threats facing the gambling industry, watch the webinar.