In the iGaming industry, welcome bonuses and rewards are common strategies to attract new users. These one-time incentives are meant to drive acquisition, but often end up being exploited by existing users.

This misuse forms the basis of gnoming and multi-accounting fraud which impacts platforms in the following 4 ways:

1. Welcome Bonus Abuse

Fraudsters use "hit-and-run" tactics to drain promotional budgets, inflating Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) without gaining a long-term player.

2. Matched Betting

By placing equal and opposite bets across multiple accounts, fraudsters "lock in" profits from bonuses, ensuring the house always loses.

3. Distorted Analytics

Fake accounts skew data on new user growth and engagement, leading to poor business decisions based on "ghost" traffic.

4. Degraded User Experience

In peer-to-peer games like poker, gnoming allows for collusion, which ruins the experience for honest players and destroys platform trust.