Game-Changing Identity: Bank-Strength Tech Transforms Esports
The runaway popularity of Esports may surprise those who haven't played computer games competitively or watched pro matches online, but the boom is real. With major tournament purses topping $1 million and an audience expected to reach 641 million viewers by the end of 2025, Esports is one of the fastest-growing parts of the sports world. The International Olympic Committee is even joining the fun by hosting its first Esports games in 2027 and by 2030, Esports is expected to be worth $7.5 billion.
But this rapid growth has come at a cost. Fraudsters routinely exploit the key weakness in online gaming: the ability to maintain multiple accounts and pose as someone else. Esports organisers suffer real financial loss when highly ranked players disguise themselves to join lower-level matches where they're overqualified to compete, destroying the other players' chances, removing any fairness in the sport, and scooping the cash winnings.
So how can event organisers be sure that players are who they say they are? The solution lies with innovative safeguards now being piloted: robust identity verification tools like those used by banks, which can stop Esports cheaters in their tracks.
What's Wrong with Smurfing?
Before we look at how identity verification is being deployed on the Esports field, it's important to understand the widespread impact of the impersonation fraud described above. It's known as smurfing, after a famous World of Warcraft champion who played under a new nickname, Papa Smurf, became so successful that no one wanted to battle him.
Gaming culture can be known for tolerating and even rewarding bad-boy behaviour, but smurfing is causing real damage to the online community. These fraudsters don't just skew competitions for their own financial gain; they're also notorious for toxic behaviour: they demoralise lower-rank players and fling abuse, which turns off contestants and fans, and puts lucrative Esports sponsorship deals at risk.
Even in amateur matches without prize money, participants complain that smurfing ruins gameplay and makes it harder to rise through the ranks. Toxic behaviour isn't limited to those who are smurfing, either. The gaming industry has worked hard to eliminate racist, sexist, or other hateful speech by players, but it can be hard to enforce community guidelines and punish bad actors if they can just open new accounts.
This challenge highlights exactly why the UK's approach to innovation matters. Rather than waiting for problems to become crises, British companies excel at taking proven solutions from one sector and applying them creatively to emerging challenges. The UK's financial technology expertise is now creating fairer, more secure gaming for players worldwide – a perfect example of cross-sector innovation driving competitive advantage.
Bringing a Banking Innovation to the Esports Field
The strategy behind smurfing isn't new to those in fraud prevention. Money launderers have been leveraging similar tactics for years: breaking suspicious transactions into smaller amounts to spread across multiple accounts, in a bid to avoid detection. Other kinds of financial smurfs include criminals referred to as "money mules," who open a bank account with their own personal details and then give full control of the account to another individual.
Whether on the Esports field or in banking, smurfing always entails impersonation: intentionally using multiple accounts, with the objective of stealing money.
What's revolutionary here is that leading Esports companies are now looking to the banking industry to adopt similar technologies to tackle smurfing in gaming. This is an exciting move for the gaming industry, and it's particularly clever, too, considering the industry's challenges so closely align with those encountered in financial services.
Over the past 20 years, banks have successfully used identity verification and authentication technologies to meet Know Your Customer (KYC) obligations, and Daon has been a long-term partner to major financial institutions as they bring their identity verification systems to the next level. When we were approached by a global Esports leader to explore how our expertise could combat smurfing, we were glad to help.
If robust identity verification is done when a customer is onboarded, it's incredibly powerful, because it lets companies begin that relationship on the right footing, with customer identity strongly established. After onboarding, companies just need to use robust ongoing authentication, ideally by incorporating biometric factors, and they can eliminate the vast majority of fraud.
The technology has earned trust across the most security-critical sectors. Banks, insurance companies, credit unions, and wealth management firms - industries where a single breach can cost millions and destroy reputations - have made identity verification and authentication core to their operations.
The success of these technologies in banking shows why they have huge potential beyond financial services, especially in gaming. Identity proofing, alongside robust authentication, lets Esports companies engage with new and existing players confidently, reassured that they are who they say they are and that they're authorised to play that match that's about to begin.
Getting Gamers On-Board: Frictionless Identity Verification, Plus Incentives
The reason that identity verification and authentication is such an elegant solution – especially in gaming, where players are keen to get online – is that it's extremely lowfriction. This means players won't need to use passwords that they could forget, or clunky, two-factor logins that stand between them and the match.
Solutions like those provided by Daon strike the right balance for impatient gamers: just a selfie and ID document scan gets players verified and into the action. And with 25 years of experience in digital identity, Daon knows how to dial in just the right balance of security and ease-of-use.
That's why London-founded FACEIT, one of the leading competitive gaming platforms, partnered with Daon to pioneer this approach to improving gamers' experience. Understanding extremely well how to incentivise players to get verified, they've been open with customers in their messaging: they admit that smurfing is a challenge, and they say that creating a fairer community is a goal that all players can help achieve by getting themselves verified. Verification is fast, free, and opt-in, and verified users will be recognised in several ways.
That recognition includes a badge that they can show off on their profile, along with a visibility boost, making it easier for other players to find them on the service. Future incentives may include financial discounts on premium subscriptions and the opportunity to compete in certain championships.
But staying ahead requires more than just user buy-in – it means anticipating how fraud itself is evolving.
Staying Ahead of AI-Powered Threats
As gaming fraud evolves, so do the technologies designed to combat it.The rise of artificial intelligence has created new challenges for identity verification, with fraudsters now able to generate synthetic voices, deepfake videos, and sophisticated document forgeries that can fool traditional security systems. These AI-generated identities pose a particular threat to gaming platforms because they enable sophisticated multi-accounting schemes - fraudsters can create seemingly legitimate identities to circumvent bans and establish multiple accounts that appear to belong to different real people.
Modern identity verification systems combat these threats through advanced presentation attack detection and synthetic content analysis. These technologies can identify telltale signs of AI generation that are invisible to the human eye, ensuring that even as fraudsters adopt more sophisticated tools to create fake identities for multi-accounting, legitimate players remain protected and competitive integrity is maintained.
Behind the Scenes: Identity Proofing and Privacy by Design
What does this look like in practice for players? Modern identity verification platforms are designed to balance security with user experience, all while protecting customer data. To minimise the risk of players abandoning the verification process, these systems typically offer flexibility in how players can verify their identity:
• Complete verification using both a selfie and ID document scan
• Simplified face-only verification for lower-risk scenarios
Regardless of the method, players must first provide explicit consent for data processing, ensuring compliance with GDPR and international privacy regulations. Once verification is complete, the system runs automated checks: cross-referencing against databases of existing players to ensure the person isn't attempting to create duplicate accounts or get around a banning scenario.
After initial verification, ongoing authentication is minimal. Occasional facial recognition checks confirm that the person playing matches the verified identity on file.
Given that eSports players tend to be technically sophisticated, gaming platforms implementing these systems emphasise transparency about data protection measures:
Gaming Without Borders
eSports competitions draw players from every continent, speaking dozens of languages and carrying identity documents from nearly 200 different countries. This global reach presents unique verification challenges - a system that works for UK players might fail completely for competitors from Southeast Asia or Latin America. Effective identity verification platforms must be truly universal, capable of processing everything from US driver's licences to Nigerian national ID cards to Japanese residence permits. Platforms like Daon's offer this breadth of capability out of the box making them a perfect fit for the global gaming market.
Privacy by Design
During the identity verification process, the player's face is not stored; rather, a biometric template – an alphanumeric code – is generated from their unique appearance and saved to Daon's encrypted servers, which are protected by Hardware Security Modules (HSM) that secure the master encryption keys. The gamer's personal data, on the other hand, is stored with the organisation and not shared in the authentication process. That means even if someone could breach the multi-layered security defences, stored information would still be meaningless: there's no way to match the template with a specific player's real name or email. Regular penetration testing ensures these protections remain robust against evolving threats.
Audited for Compliance
Leading identity verification providers maintain comprehensive Information Security Management Systems with regular third-party audits for compliance. Look for platforms with ISO 27001 certification, along with additional standards like ISO 27701 for Privacy Information Management Systems and ISO 27018 for protection of personally identifiable information in cloud environments, as these demonstrate adherence to international security and privacy standards.
Working with Gamers to Create a Fairer Playing Field
Early indications suggest gamers' keenness to help address smurfing, an issue that everyone knows hurts the community.
As well as smurfing, there's a related kind of fraud known as boosting which can also be tackled by identity verification. Boosting is when a low-ranked player pays money to a highly ranked player to log in to their account and play as them, for the purpose of increasing their rank. Boosting is against the rules, but it's almost impossible to stop: there are even illicit boosting marketplaces that are dedicated to matching and processing payments between experienced players and those desperate to increase their rank.
That kind of impersonation is likely to die out, however, in a community where face scans before a match begins are becoming the norm. Like a referee checking the gloves of boxers before a bout, pre-match authentication could become a standard part of gameplay in Esports.
Securing the Arena is Best for Esports Professionals, and Best for Fans
Because Esports is a global phenomenon, it needs a globally proven solution to the fraud challenges it's facing. That means a solution that can scale to hundreds of millions of verifications, and that can recognise identity documents from hundreds of countries.
As Esports continues to grow at a CAGR of 23.1% from 2025 to 2030, there's no doubt that robust authentication is a good next step for players and fans alike. Rapid growth without ID checks and safeguards could lead to an Esports environment that only protects the strong.
By taking a robust stand against smurfing with identity verification and authentication, the industry sends a strong message to players and fans everywhere that Esports are for everyone.
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Before this, Rory worked in the House of Commons and House of Lords alongside completing degrees in Political Economy and Global Politics.
Today, Rory leads techUK's emerging technologies activity across everything from immersive, web3, AI and robotics to space, gaming & metaverse.
This involves co-running techUK's flagship Innovation campaign, managing four series (including the 'Meet the Innovators' interview series), and launching 4-6-month 'sprint campaigns' on transformative technologies and sectors.
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Before this, Rory worked in the House of Commons and House of Lords alongside completing degrees in Political Economy and Global Politics.
Today, Rory leads techUK's emerging technologies activity across everything from immersive, web3, AI and robotics to space, gaming & metaverse.
This involves co-running techUK's flagship Innovation campaign, managing four series (including the 'Meet the Innovators' interview series), and launching 4-6-month 'sprint campaigns' on transformative technologies and sectors.
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