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James Elliott has spent more than two decades working in the online gambling industry, but the idea behind Gamecheck emerged from a problem that conventional legal tools were struggling to solve.
Having trained as an intellectual property lawyer in London, Elliott entered the technology sector with America Online before moving to Gibraltar and online gaming in 2005. Roles at PartyGaming and bwin.party were followed by a move to the supplier side with NetEnt, where protecting some of the industry’s best-known casino titles exposed him directly to the scale and complexity of game counterfeiting.
“At NetEnt, one of the biggest things I was having to deal with was trying to work out who was doing the copying, where the copying was taking place and how I could get those guys and bring them to justice,” he explains.
The problem was not simply identifying infringements. Fake games frequently originated in jurisdictions where conventional intellectual property enforcement was difficult, expensive and slow. “You’d think it would be really easy to issue proceedings against people that are copying your intellectual property, but actually it’s not that easy. Most of them are in countries that you can’t really reach.”
That experience ultimately prompted Elliott to reconsider the problem. Rather than relying solely on pursuing individual infringers, why not make the information about counterfeit games publicly available and allow players to decide whether they trusted the casino offering them?
“We thought, let’s flip the model on its head. I can tell people where the genuine games are, I can tell people where we’ve found fakes and I can publish this information on a publicly searchable website. Then the consumer can make their own decision as to whether they want to play on these sites or not.”
The result was Gamecheck, a platform built around identifying and exposing fake casino content while providing players with a means of checking the authenticity of the games they encounter. For Elliott, the approach represents a practical extension of his legal background rather than a rejection of traditional enforcement.
“Law firms do a fantastic job and they’re doing the piece where they go through the process of bringing actions against individuals. For me, this was about trying to create a practical solution that would save everyone some money and effort. You can bring your legal knowledge and training and put that into practice in a way where you’re solving problems more efficiently and cost effectively.”
The scale of the problem
The figures Gamecheck has accumulated suggest counterfeit casino games are far from a marginal concern. According to Elliott, Gamecheck has now tested around 80,000 gaming URLs, with approximately 5,000 sites found to contain fake content. “That surprises people, but it’s the truth,” he says.
The problem is not necessarily concentrated among established operators in mature regulated markets. Elliott says the greater risk lies in emerging markets and among newer brands, where operators can appear rapidly and players may have fewer established reference points for judging whether a site is trustworthy.
“Household names that you and I are familiar with will not have fakes on them. But when you’re looking at emerging markets, where new websites are appearing on a regular basis because the market hasn’t matured, that’s where people need to be more careful.”
More concerning is the sophistication with which counterfeit content can be deployed. Elliott says Gamecheck has identified cases in which operators have alternated between legitimate and counterfeit versions rather than simply populating a casino with fake content.
“We’ve even managed to find companies that have switched between genuine and fake depending on which players are playing and the time of day,” he explains. The economic incentive is straightforward: counterfeit games allow an operator to avoid, or significantly reduce, the licensing fees payable to the legitimate game supplier.
The consequences, however, extend much further. “The answer to who’s losing out is everyone,” says Elliott. For players, a counterfeit version of a familiar title may have been altered so that its mathematical model no longer resembles the authentic game. “The game has probably been reformatted or reconfigured in such a way that it won’t pay winnings as much as the genuine game. The RTP will have been affected so that wins aren’t triggered as often.”
Game developers lose licensing revenue and control over their intellectual property, while legitimate operators risk suffering from declining trust in online casino content more broadly. “If players start experiencing fake games, they’re going to lose trust in the industry. Even operators lose out because people won’t want to play as much if they’re not sure whether a game is genuine.”
From game testing to game authenticity
Elliott sees today’s authentication challenge as an evolution of one the online gambling sector confronted at its inception. When online casino first emerged, players questioned whether they could safely deposit money with websites operating from unfamiliar jurisdictions and whether games behaved in accordance with their advertised mathematics.
The industry’s response was independent testing. “We worked with game testing labs and independent third parties that could say these games had been tested and were running according to the RTP they were supposed to.” Companies including GLI, iTech Labs and eCOGRA helped establish confidence that games performed as claimed. The new challenge, Elliott argues, goes one stage further.
“Previously it was, ‘Does the game perform according to the way it’s supposed to?’ Now it’s, ‘Is this actually the genuine game?'” He describes Gamecheck’s role as analogous to identifying the security features on a banknote. “You know the manufacturer has built its reputation over years. Game authenticity is one of a bag of problems that needs to be resolved and Gamecheck provides a solution so that when you’re playing your game, you know it’s the real thing.”
AI accelerates both sides
Artificial intelligence has the potential to intensify the issue. Elliott believes AI tools are dramatically reducing the resources required to recreate existing games, lowering the barrier for those seeking to produce counterfeit content.
“AI can be used to copy anything now. It can be used to design games, reverse engineer games and build them again in a way that previously would have taken months of developer and designer time.”
AI makes counterfeiting faster and potentially more sophisticated. At the same time, Elliott argues that awareness and detection capabilities are improving. Gamecheck’s expanding database aggregates information on counterfeit sites across multiple providers, while players themselves are increasingly sharing warnings.
“The player community loves knowing where fakes are. They love telling their friends and posting about it. Through our social tools, we give them the information and they do the rest of the work for us. People talk.”
Gamecheck is also working with affiliates, influencers and regulators. Elliott highlights its partnership with Casino Guru, which incorporates Gamecheck results into the information it presents to players. For Elliott, affiliates have an important role to play because their recommendations can directly influence where consumers choose to deposit.
Regulatory interest is increasing too. “Initially regulators probably didn’t think that we had much of a role to play within their confines. As we’ve become more recognised, regulators have become more open-minded about talking to us.”
The relationship can work in both directions. A regulator may see what appears to be a legitimate supplier’s game on an unlicensed website and assume the provider is knowingly servicing that market. Gamecheck can help determine whether the content is genuine at all, potentially distinguishing supplier activity from unauthorised copying.
Building a visible sign of trust
The next stage in the company’s development is the Gamecheck Seal. Designed to sit directly on an operator’s website, the Seal provides a visible indication that Gamecheck is auditing the site’s game content.
“The Gamecheck Seal is effectively a hologram or watermark that says Gamecheck has tested our games and fake games have not been found on this website,” explains Elliott.
The Seal incorporates a QR code that links back to Gamecheck, allowing a player to confirm that the certification itself is genuine and allocated to the domain they are visiting. Crucially, verification is not designed as a one-off exercise, with Gamecheck continuing to conduct unannounced spot checks after the Seal has been awarded.
“We’re constantly providing spot checks to make sure the games are still the right ones,” says Elliott. Operators are deliberately not told when those checks will take place. Should counterfeit content subsequently be identified, Elliott says Gamecheck will revoke the Seal and publicly highlight the finding. “That’s a big deterrent.”
Gamecheck currently charges operators €250 per month per URL for the service. For Elliott, however, the longer-term objective is to push verification closer towards the actual game session itself.
The company is examining technology that could provide players with ongoing confirmation that the session they are playing is genuinely being supplied by the developer they expect. “We’re looking at ways in which we can create some form of plug-in or ongoing identifier to say that the game session that person’s playing is still a live session.”
Any such system, he stresses, would need to operate without slowing the experience or interfering with game code. Elliott nevertheless believes Gamecheck is getting closer to a solution.
“We’re confident that in the not-too-distant future we’ll have a solution which will tell players, while they’re playing, that that particular game session is being supplied by the game provider they think they’re playing with.”
Towards an industry standard
After two years of operation, Elliott believes awareness of Gamecheck has reached the point where the company can turn its attention towards broader adoption. “The good news is that lots of people know who we are now,” he says.
The immediate priority is convincing more operators to carry the Gamecheck Seal. Beyond that lies a potentially more significant step: recognition from regulators and the possibility of authentication becoming a more formal component of the industry’s trust infrastructure.
“The next phase would be many operators saying they want the Gamecheck Seal on their site because it’s that ISO-type standard or sign of authenticity people should be looking for. Then the next phase from that is regulators partnering with us and saying, ‘We think the Gamecheck Seal is a really valuable part of the trust creation journey and we’d like to recommend our licensees take it.'”
Whether Gamecheck ultimately becomes consumer protection, compliance infrastructure or an industry-wide authentication standard remains open. Elliott himself is less concerned about the label. “For us, it’s about trust in the product.”
What is clear is that Gamecheck represents a significant change in how Elliott believes intellectual property infringement can be tackled. Instead of depending solely upon legal action against counterfeiters, the company seeks to diminish their commercial value by exposing them directly to the people whose money they depend upon.
“I think information has become very easy to display and very easy to search. We’ve seen the power of consumer-generated reviews and opinions through things like Trustpilot, Google reviews and even Uber ratings,” Elliott concludes. “I trained as a lawyer and I love technology. Put them both together and let’s see if we can find something that works.”
