Multi Accounting Is on the Rise: Who Is Affected & How to Stop It

Have you ever signed up for a service with different accounts? You might have, without noticing, broken their terms and conditions by performing what is known as multi accounting.

Of course, it doesn’t make you a fraudster but those who purposefully create multiple accounts to abuse a system are crossing a fine line between customer benefits and company damage and hence, perpetuating iGaming fraud. 

What Is Multi Accounting?

Multi-accounting fraud is a practice that consists of creating or using multiple accounts under different identities on a single platform to manipulate services, evade detection and engage in activities typically prohibited by the terms of service.  

In fraudulent scenarios, multi-accounting can be particularly problematic as it allows one individual to control numerous accounts simultaneously, leading to a magnified ability to deceive, scam and disrupt. Multi-accounting can also be used to bypass account-level penalties and restrictions, such as bans or limits imposed by each platform on its single accounts – and as a result, poses significant challenges for online security and fraud detection.

In its most advanced form, this behavior can evolve into more elaborate techniques, where organized fraudsters use emulators, virtual machines and sophisticated proxy services to create seemingly authentic user profiles. This leads to financial losses, distorted platform data and various negative impacts for operators and companies.

3 Examples of Multi Accounting Fraud

To understand the different faces multi-accounting fraud can take, here are three ways that this type of fraud can manifest:

Promo Abuse:

Also called coupon or bonus abuse, fraudsters create multiple accounts in promo abuse to take advantage of incentives, free trials, coupons and other offers. This activity is driven by the intent to disproportionately benefit from special introductory offers typically designed to be used once per new user to encourage them to try a new service or product.

The process often involves sophisticated tactics to conceal the true identity of the abusers, like using VPNs to mask IP addresses, creating fake email accounts or employing bots to automate sign-ups. Fraudsters who commit promo abuse manipulate offers by registering several times under different identities or through various contact details to sidestep limitations set by the companies. This not only results in undue financial gains for the abusers at the expense of the company but also skews marketing data and can lead to losses in revenue. Additionally, this kind of abuse can undermine the trust of genuine customers and dilute the perceived value of the company’s offering.

Fake Reviews:

Common in ecommerce, online dating and travel industries, fake reviews involve fraudulent activities where individuals or coordinated groups use multiple accounts to generate positive (or sometimes negative) reviews, ratings or feedback to impact the reputation of a product or service. This deceptive practice is intended to manipulate the perceived quality or popularity of an offering.

In ecommerce, fake reviews can make a product appear more reliable or popular than it is, leading to increased sales. In online dating, it may be used to enhance the attractiveness of a profile, increasing its visibility and interactions. Hotels, restaurants and tourist attractions may appear more appealing or less desirable in the travel industry based on manipulated feedback, influencing booking rates and business reputations.

Fraudsters typically create or buy multiple fake accounts or hire individuals to post reviews praising or disparaging competitors’ products. These reviews are crafted to seem authentic, mimicking the language and style of genuine customers to evade detection by both users and platforms’ automated systems. The impact of fake reviews extends beyond misleading consumers; it can distort fair competition, degrade trust in online platforms and result in financial losses for consumers and legitimate businesses.

Affiliate Fraud

Affiliate fraud in the context of multi-accounting is a deceptive practice where individuals or groups exploit affiliate marketing programs by creating multiple accounts. Affiliate marketing involves companies paying commissions to external sites or affiliates for directing traffic or sales through referrals. This fraud typically occurs when fraudsters illegally simulate fake transactions or referrals to claim these commissions.

Common methods include fake transactions where multiple accounts are used to appear as genuine purchases, using stolen credit card details or making actual purchases that are later canceled to generate commissions. Fraudsters may also self-referral, sign up as affiliates, and use other accounts to purchase through their referral links. They may also commit click fraud by generating excessive clicks on affiliate links without intending to make purchases. Some even manipulate tracking systems to inflate commissions unfairly.

The impact of multi-accounting in affiliate fraud is profound, draining financial resources by paying out unwarranted commissions and skewing analytics, leading to inaccurate business insights.

But there’s more; below we’ll look at some examples of multi accounting that are specific to different verticals.

Which Industries Are Most Affected by Multi-Accounting?

The following industries are the most affected when it comes to multi accounting scams:

• Ecommerce: Companies face significant challenges in this sector with multi-account payment fraud and promo abuse. Fraudsters exploit these platforms to initiate chargebacks and abuse discount codes or special offers on a large scale, creating substantial financial burdens for merchants.
• Loan Providers: Online loan providers are particularly vulnerable to fraudsters who use multiple accounts to secure loans fraudulently and disappear without repayment. Similarly, financial institutions must vigilantly prevent these actors from accessing promotional offers or manipulating payment methods for illegal purposes.
• Online Dating: In the social media and online dating world, users will create multiple accounts to reach more people – often to scam or spam users. 
• Travel: The travel industry faces challenges from fake bookings and fraudulent reviews, which can be perpetrated by scammers or competitors seeking to damage the reputations of legitimate businesses.
• Gambling / iGaming: Players in digital gaming often create secondary accounts to test strategies without jeopardizing the statistics of their leading accounts – a practice known as smurfing that, while seemingly benign, can destabilize the gaming ecosystem. Other tactics like arbitrage and matched betting involve users, including some high-profile gamblers, opening multiple accounts to unfairly influence game outcomes and betting odds, thereby compromising the fairness and integrity of the platforms.

How to Detect and Prevent Multi-Accounting Fraud

Multi-accounting persists because the profits are real and the system gaps are easy to exploit. To close them, companies combine advanced detection, machine learning that analyzes patterns across accounts and stricter verification that confirms each user is genuine. The strongest signals come from four sources:

• Digital Footprinting: By tracking a person’s online presence, digital footprinting builds a social profile from the details collected at onboarding, such as email addresses and phone numbers. Real users leave a trail across social and digital platforms, so a thin or missing footprint is one of the clearest ways to separate legitimate accounts from suspicious ones.
• Device Intelligence: This method builds a unique fingerprint for each device from thousands of real-time hardware and software attributes, including CPU, GPU, screen resolution, browser configuration and network settings. Its real strength is linking accounts that look unrelated, because identical device, browser or cookie hashes reveal one person behind many profiles. When a user hides behind an emulator, virtual machine or jailbroken device, that mismatch is flagged as a spoofing attempt.
• Email analysis: Through data enrichment, this approach examines each email address for domain authenticity, registration date and links to social media, all of which indicate whether an account is genuine. Fraudsters tend to rely on newly created emails from free providers with no history of data breaches, which makes their addresses stand out under scrutiny.
• IP analysis: Advanced IP analysis goes beyond basic checks to include geolocation, exposing the VPNs, Tor networks and proxies used to mask a real location. Because location masking is central to most multi-accounting schemes, a device claiming one country while the account states another becomes an immediate signal.

No single check catches everything, so operators combine all four to link accounts one person is trying to keep apart.

Key Takeaways for Multi Accounting

Multi-accounting is hard to stop because the damage never shows up in one account. A single person can run dozens of profiles to abuse promotions, inflate reviews and claim affiliate commissions, yet each account looks legitimate on its own.

That is why account-level checks miss it. Catching multi-accounting means reading signals across accounts: the shared devices, IP addresses, emails and phone numbers that reveal one person behind many users.

Verification confirms who someone claims to be. Connecting these signals shows when many users are really one, and that is what protects genuine customers and keeps platform data reliable.

Frequently Asked Questions

You might also be interested in reading about:

• SEON: How to Prevent iGaming Fraud
• SEON: Online Gambling Fraud: Detection & Prevention
• SEON: Transaction Monitoring in iGaming: How It’s Used to Fight Fraud

Further Reading

Learn more about:

Digital Footprinting | Device Fingerprinting | Fraud Detection & Prevention