Data sent to Gambling Insider from Iovation’s 2019 Gambling Industry Report shows 9.2m fraudulent gambling transactions were stopped in 2018, with 518m transactions processed overall.

The cyber-security firm’s annual report focuses on the trends which drove gambling last year and provides insights into how to drive differentiation with players in 2019.

Transactions processed via mobile devices grew at an average annual rate of 95% since 2012, rising from 6% to 70% by 2018.

However, Iovation found bonus abuse has increased 287% in the last three years, while game abuses and cheating also rose – although this growth slowed from 55% in 2017 to 12% in 2018.

Credit card fraud reports have gone up by 155% among Iovation’s clients, with an average annual growth of 39%.

Other threats highlighted by Iovation came from the cultivation and selling of VIP accounts for money-laundering purposes, as well as distraction attacks – where Bots are used to distract operators from other fraudulent activity.

Another major issue emphasised by Iovation was self-exclusion, with over 795,000 devices and more than 965,000 accounts associated with a self-exclusion report attempting to access online gaming.

This was four times higher than the 223,000 self-exclusion reports placed by operators, despite the figure growing by 73% since 2016.