Understanding Payment Fraud in iGaming

by Tamas Kadar
If you’ve ever wanted to play online detective, OSINT, or open-source intelligence, is the way to go. But what exactly is it, and how can it help your business? Let’s find out.
Open Source Intelligence software, abbreviated as OSINT software, are tools that allow the collection of information that is publicly available or open-source. The goal of OSINT software is mainly to learn more about someone or a business.
According to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, over 99% of the internet’s data cannot be accessed by major search engines. That includes public data that OSINT software can help you gather.
More advanced OSINT software will help you combine multiple data points n order to cross-reference information – and to gain a source of truth.
Broadly speaking, there are then two key features to consider when choosing your OSINT software:
Aside from that, any good OSINT software will help you access information that is:
SEON is the only fraud prevention tool that checks more than 50 social and online signals
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Disclaimer: Everything written about the companies mentioned in this article was gleaned from online research, including user reviews. We did not have time to manually test all the tools. However, we ensured the information was correct as of Q1 2022. Feel free to contact us to request an update/correction.
Maltego is a Java application that claims to simplify and expedite your investigations. How exactly? Thanks to its fantastic access to databases and visualization tools.
Whether you’re in trust and safety, law enforcement, or cybersecurity, the company lets you run one-click investigations that deliver easy-to-understand results.
At the time of writing, Maltego lets you view up to 1 million entities on a graph, with access to 58 data sources. You can even connect your own public databases and upload data sources manually.
Once all the information is loaded in the program, you can choose from different visualization layouts, such as blocks, hierarchical, or circular, using weights and notes to adjust the graphs.
Finally, Maltego isn’t just a great tool; the company also has a fantastic collection of hand-picked resources on OSINT tools and techniques to help you get even more from their product. In fact, there is even a Maltego foundations course you can purchase online.
Maltego pricing:
Maltego pros:
Maltego cons:
Confirming IDs by checking for linked social media and online platform accounts is becoming increasingly popular for a number of good reasons:
Of course, you can manually search directly into your target network, by typing a name into LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter. For scalability reasons, however, it’s easier to use a specialist solution. This is where SEON shines.
SEON is the only fraud prevention tool that checks more than 50 social and online signals. These checks are based on an email address or phone number.
Because they’re part of our email and phone data enrichment modules, you’ll get a lot more information, including a risk score. The other good news is that you do get complete flexibility in how you query the service: manually, via API, or through a Google Chrome extension.
SEON pricing:
SEON pros:
SEON cons:
Lampyre is a paid application designed specifically for OSINT. It’s particularly useful for due diligence, cyber threat intelligence, crime analysis, and financial analytics. You can install it on your PC or run it online.
The key selling point of Lampyre is that it’s a one-click application. Start with single data points such as a company registration number, full name, or phone number, and Lampyre will sift through huge amounts of data to extract interesting information.
The company automatically processes 100+ regularly updated data sources, and you can access them via PC software or API calls if needed. The SaaS product is called Lighthouse, and you pay per API call.
An important point here: As with many OSINT tools, you have to perform your due diligence to check if the databases are really open source. Lampyre may automate searches, but you may still have to double-check where the information comes from, as well as who exactly it is that is sourcing it for you, as one researcher found out.
Lampyre pricing:
Lampyre pros:
Lampyre cons:
Search engines such as Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo are perfectly adequate free OSINT tools. That is, if you know how to use advanced filters. In short, it’s about refining your search to benefit from the indexing power of some of the best algorithms on the planet.
Over the years, talented investigators have learned how to reverse-engineer search engines. The method is called Google dorking, or Google hacking, and it uses search operators or functions to expand the capacity of the tools (it works with search engines beyond Google, too).
The method is controversial, because it may cross the line in terms of how “public” the information is.
For instance, you may find a link to a PDF file containing a list of passwords, but downloading it may be a prosecutable offense.
Examples of search operators include:
An example of Google dorking would be to search, e.g. company.website.domain for PDF files, which you would do by typing “site:company.website.domain filetype:pdf”. You’d be surprised at the number of documents that are openly available if you know how to get Google to fetch them for you.
You can read more about known Google Dork operators here.
Google Pricing:
Google pros:
Google cons:
Recon-ng initially started as a free and open-source script for gathering technical information about website domains. Since its creation, it has evolved into a full framework, which you can access via a command-line interface on Kali Linux, or as a web application.
Its interface is similar to Metasploitable, another computer security project designed for penetration testing, and has similar goals: to assess and identify web vulnerabilities. Its features include GeoIP lookup, DNS lookup, and port scanning, among others.
While it’s certainly one of the more technical tools featured on this list, you’ll find plenty of resources online to learn how Recon-ng can locate sensitive files such as robots.txt, identify hidden subdomains, look for SQL errors, and get information about a company’s CMS or WHOIS.
Recon-ng pricing:
Recon-ng pros:
Recon-ng cons:
SpiderFoot is an OSINT tool designed specifically for investigation professionals. It’s loved by cybersecurity intelligence experts who need to perform regular asset discovery or attack surface monitoring.
The tool can access hundreds of open data sources and monitor the results in real-time. The key difference with other OSINT tools, however, is how you can use SpiderFoot.
You can choose to self-host it as a true open-source version. You can also purchase the hosted version, which is completely managed by SpiderFoot.
There are numerous advantages to the latter. For instance, you’ll get better performance, full team collaboration, and the ability to see correlations in your investigation. All the modules and third-party tools will come preinstalled and preconfigured.
Spiderfoot pricing:
Spiderfoot pros:
Spiderfoot cons:
When it comes to checking US citizens’ records, there are plenty of services offering more or less the same features at the same price range. You might hear of BeenVerified, Pip, or Intelius.
Spokeo offers an easy-to-use interface and the results seem to be more accurate upon testing. You can also use Spokeo as a reverse email lookup, phone lookup tool, and postal address lookup, to get info based on a single datapoint.
The service is available online, and there’s even an Android app to perform searches directly from your smartphone.
You’ll be able to access billions of records such as property deeds, court records, and even historical records and social networks.
The only downside is that it tends to be very US-centric, so if you’re looking for someone located elsewhere, you might have to use another tool.
Spokeo pricing:
Spokeo pros:
Spokeo cons:
We’ve previously written about how you can use an email data breach for user verification, but it’s particularly useful when looking at whether an email address exists or not. In fact, you can even infer how mature the address is depending on which data breach it’s been found in.
And Have I Been Pwned? is still the best site to quickly search for email addresses that appear in said data leaks (you can now also do the same with phone numbers). Best of all, it’s completely free.
Have I Been Pwned? pricing:
Have I Been Pwned? pros:
Have I Been Pwned? cons:
You may need to brush up on your Python to run PhoneInfoga, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better open-source tool for OSINT for phone numbers.
The tool squeezes as much information as you can imagine from a phone number, and it works for every location worldwide.
Note, however, that unlike with SEON’s tool, you don’t get reverse social media lookup to learn which networks the user has registered to with their phone number.
PhoneInfoga pricing:
PhoneInfoga pros:
PhoneInfoga cons:
Email Hippo, which you can also access through VerifyEmailAddress.io, has been operating since 2009.
Sure, some might say it looks like the website hasn’t been updated since, but the fact is that it works. Simply type in an email address, and the service will check MX records to confirm whether it exists or not.
What Email Hippo lacks in features, it makes up for in speed and ease-of-use. Type in an address, press GO and that’s it.
Email Hippo pricing:
Email Hippo pros:
Email Hippo cons:
OSINT tools and techniques are common in cybersecurity, where they are used to identify external threads or for ethical hacking and penetration testing.
Law enforcement agencies, private investigators, and journalists also rely on the same techniques to learn more about a crime, suspect, organization, or person of interest.
Similarly, HR professionals can perform searches on potential candidates by conducting background checks on open source directories.
Marketing and sales teams can use OSINT tools when they need to target a specific user, or simply need to check if an email address is valid.
Sadly, it should also be acknowledged that fraudsters and criminals can use the same tools and techniques for exploits. For instance, when building a synthetic ID, a fraudster can stitch data they have acquired from a darknet marketplace, and combine it with data acquired through public records.
In the context of fraud detection, OSINT helps make decisions relating to:
Open-source intelligence is a broad topic. Investigators rely on its techniques for a variety of reasons, and there it’s easy to go down a rabbit hole of advanced, very technical tools.
This is why we hope this post offers a good primer on the best OSINT tools you can start using today. That’s true whether your aim is to find marketing leads, solve a crime, secure a website, or reduce fraud rates.
SEON Fraud APIs are highly configurable for various business use-cases to match your unique business needs
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Frequently Asked Questions
OSINT, or open-source intelligence, is a process designed to gather information from public sources. These sources may be government databases, websites, or brochures, for example. To achieve this, investigators use several manual as well as automatic tools.
OSINT is a key feature of cybersecurity and criminal investigations. It’s also used in fraud detection, trust and safety, and risk management. HR and business managers can use these tools for due diligence on potential employees or partners. Marketing teams can also rely on OSINT techniques to learn more about leads.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt – 99% of the Internet’s data cannot be accessed by major search engines
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Tamas is the founder and CEO of SEON and an expert in all the technological aspects of fraud prevention.
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