Software company iovation claims its service can purge MMO games of gold farmers - and publishers like SG Interactive are giving it a go.

In a case study, iovation said ReputationManager 360 aided the publisher of Trickster Online, Grand Chase and PangYa to take action against "1,000+ fraudulent and problematic account users" who broke the terms of use agreements. It did so by observing the reputation trends of the related accounts over a 30-day period.

"The service identifies devices being used to play and examines their history and reputation as they are interacting with the game - setting off alerts that could relate to velocity triggers, geolocation, device anomalies, past gold farming abuse, financial fraud, chat abuse, and more," said Robert Siciliano, a personal security and identity theft expert contributor to iovation, in his opinion post at geekwith.com.

iovation also collaborates with the in-house anti-RMT teams of large publishers like Nexon America, with which it shares gold farming fighting tips. ReputationManager 360 users also receive alerts when gold farmers are found to be ramping up activity in one game.

"For example, if one gaming site is hit with gold farmers or a group of devices involved in a fraud ring, other iovation clients know this information upfront, before incurring chargebacks or other damage," iovation said.

Red Flags for RMT Sellers
iovation said it combats the proliferation of gold farming through a deep analysis of all the devices that access an MMO game, digging deep into where it is being used, how it has been used and which devices it is connected to. Triggers in these areas will signal a red flag that a possible gold farmer could be running the device.

"Unlike most anti-fraud measures, which look at the user connecting to your site, iovation ReputationManager 360 goes deeper to identify the device (computer, table or smartphone) being used to access your game," the company said in its ReputationManager 360 product page.

"Even when a device touches a gaming site for the first time, and iovation has no previous history for that particular device, we can still leverage what we know about the associated account and its history, the geolocation information of the transaction, and a host of other device-related properties that might indicate risk based on everything we know about similar devices," said iovation.

ReputationManager 360 said it also adds proxy-busting features to make geolocation more accurate and better identify transactions where fraudsters are trying to evade recognition. Clients are also able to link seemingly unrelated accounts and behavior to one source IP and block use from unsupported or high-risk areas of the world.

The iovation fraud prevention solutions brochure reveals as well that iovation measures events over time to track risk from bots and scammers. Large numbers of accounts created in a day or an hour could indicate risk. A discrepancy between geolocation and time zone, or a proxy IP address with a language mismatch also makes a device suspicious.