In sports betting, effective risk management and anti-fraud systems are crucial to long-term operator success. Any sharp activity, traders’ errors, last-minute goals, or unexpected underdog wins can result in multi-million losses.
Artem Kolodyazhnyy, Head of Risk Operations at GR8 Tech, and Sergii Mykhailenko, Chief Product Officer at OddsMarket, sat down to discuss modern approaches to player risk control, data utilization, and process automation, highlighting examples from GR8Tech’s operations.
Player Risk Management Today
GR8 Tech’s Risk Player Management is carried out with the support of a professional team and their advanced Risk & Anti-Fraud (RAF) ecosystem that watches every single player action — and even attempted ones — in real time. It not only blocks suspicious actions but also adjusts limits, bonuses, and loyalty programs based on the player’s constantly updated risk profile.
Why New Brands Are Prime Targets
Fraud levels aren’t the same everywhere. They depend on the region, how new the brand is, how many bonuses you run, and how mature your platform is. New operators face the threat: Up to 10% of bets can be fraud incidents right at launch. This is usually due to weak settings and organized scam groups attacking new targets. As systems stabilize, this number drops fast.
By tightly linking their RAF and Sportsbook systems, GR8 Tech eliminates this risk. Their clients see less than 5% fraud at launch and drop to under 1% in stable operation, beating the industry average.
“In Europe,” Sergii adds, “Italian, Greek, Spanish, and Albanian punters are the most dangerous ones. The last ones, however, pretend to be Italians when facing a sportsbook KYC,” Sergii laughs. “An individual sharp player gets caught sooner or later. Syndicates, however, are way more dangerous. The most successful ones can have offices downtown, dozens of employees working for a fixed monthly salary during normal business hours, their own software engineers, and, most importantly, an endless supply of documents for uninterrupted business activity. Lastly, the betting industry is still not 100% digital — offline betting shops face significant losses from people placing arbitrage bets or wagering on fixed matches.
In Latin America, syndicates are not that well organized. However, we are seeing a large number of ‘Betting academies’ that offer proven strategies based on value betting or arbitrage to hundreds of thousands of people. These academies often have their own software or act as affiliates to the top-performing odds comparison platforms.”
Arbitrage: A Dying Fraud Tactic
According to Artem, traditional arbitrage betting is becoming nearly impossible on platforms with powerful RAF tools. Nowadays, the major threat is late betting.
“Modern betting syndicates have expensive software and lightning-fast data feeds. The moment any bookmaker’s data slows down, they instantly find the gap and try to exploit it.“
GR8 Tech’s RAF uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and over 10 Machine Learning (ML) models to predict risky behavior before a player even places their first bet.
- It connects a risk management specialist at 30-40% fraud probability.
- It makes automated limitation decisions at 70% or higher.
While arbitrage levels vary, GR8 Tech sees the highest activity in certain countries within Eastern Europe, MENA, LATAM, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Artem explains that this is largely influenced by local market conditions:
Value Bets: The Search for EV+ Players
GR8 Tech employs advanced analytics — including Closing Line Value (CLV) and a wide range of contextual event data — to evaluate both the quality of its odds and player behavior.
Rather than simply comparing static odds data, the company analyzes the entire betting context: when a player acts, how the line has moved, and the reasoning behind each bet amount and selection. Powered by AI and Machine Learning, the system detects EV+ activity patterns early and balances potential exposure through a multi-level system of limits — tailored by region, tournament, event, and market type.
As Artem notes, EV+ bettors make up less than 3% of GR8 Tech’s clients’ total player base.
Managing Late/Aftergoal Bets
Without effective protection, late bets can account for 5–10% of total stakes; GR8 Tech keeps that figure below 1%, as most after-goal wagers are detected and blocked at placebet.
Live bets undergo a standard 5–6 second validation window — ‘this is when the magic happens,’ Artem notes — during which the RAF engine evaluates line movement, bet timing, stake size and dozens of other signals.
The Power of Real-Time Data
GR8 Tech integrates with multiple odds providers, including OddsMarket, allowing the platform to validate incoming data. The RAF system processes these feeds in two key ways: historical analysis and real-time reaction.
Historical analysis tracks how bookmakers’ odds change over time, helping the system spot fraud patterns and evaluate the quality of odds. It also detects suspicious bets that might otherwise go unnoticed.
“At OddsMarket, we make sure that data latency never becomes a weak link in operators’ risk defense,” adds Sergii Mykhailenko. “When feeds update within milliseconds, platforms like GR8Tech can make real-time, confident decisions that protect their margins.”
The Role of Automation
The system combines machine precision with human insight. It automatically detects, classifies, and limits risky players in 80–90% of cases, leaving only the most complex situations for manual review by the risk team. It uses multi-layered segmentation to track player behavior from registration and first deposit to betting patterns and withdrawals.
According to Artem, over the last 10 years, their RAF system has consistently protected 5–10% of operators’ monthly GGR, with this figure sometimes reaching 15–20%during new launches or aggressive bonus campaigns, depending on region and marketing strategy.
“Today, automation in sports betting isn’t just a trend — clearly it is the foundation of competitiveness. But automation is only as strong as the data behind it. That’s where providers like OddsMarket add real value — delivering the accuracy and speed that help systems perform at their full potential.” – comments Sergii.
Why Manual Odds Monitoring is Still Important?
A RAF system can’t be isolated. Automation covers part of machine-human interaction, but there is always room for manual risk management work when it comes to odds boosting for certain events picked by a marketing team, individual bonuses, etc. Using the OddsMarket Monitoring Tool (OMT), risk managers can pay special attention to odds behavior in real-time and afterwards through the odds/scores archive.