Welcome bonuses are becoming organized fraud in iGaming, Legitimuz says

Welcome bonuses were designed as acquisition tools. In practice, Legitimuz says they have become a business model for a growing layer of organized fraud, with teams, tooling, and a supply chain built to turn bonus abuse into repeatable volume. For PSPs and risk teams, the important part is that this is no longer a one-account problem.

1. Legitimuz’s core point is that the pattern only becomes visible when you look across accounts, not at each registration in isolation. A standard KYC (know your customer) flow that checks identity, documents, and liveness one by one can miss the same device, behavior pattern, or forged document template showing up across dozens of supposedly unrelated sign-ups.
2. The old version of bonus abuse was simple: one user opening a second account to claim the same welcome offer twice. The newer version is organized at scale, with groups creating hundreds of fabricated identities, forged documents, and configured devices specifically to farm bonuses. According to the text, that setup has its own cost structure and return profile.
3. Legitimuz says the lower cost of manufacturing fake identities has helped push this from nuisance to business line. Synthetic documents, AI-generated photos, and services that sell batches of fabricated identities have reduced the entry cost enough that bonus fraud can remain profitable by volume, even when the return from any single account is small.
4. In practice, the operation combines three pieces: identity fabrication, device infrastructure, and the minimum activity needed to cash out the bonus. That device layer can include emulator farms, rooted devices, or virtual cameras used to make each account look like it belongs to a different user and handset. The fraud then often stops at the minimum rollover requirement before withdrawal.
5. The clearest signals, Legitimuz says, are cross-account signals: device intelligence that flags multiple identities sharing the same hardware fingerprint, and document analysis that spots different files built from the same production template. That is the difference between checking paperwork and detecting a bonus farm.

For high-risk operators, the takeaway is straightforward: bonus abuse is no longer just a promotions issue. Once it is organized around fabricated identities and device evasion, it becomes a payments and risk problem, because the whole point is to convert promotional value into withdrawable balance.