Building trust in online games is crucial. When every industry was experiencing a decline during the times of the Covid-19 pandemic, gaming industries saw a rapid increase in their numbers. This benefited the gaming developers in generating revenues but created possibilities for new scamming techniques to an upsurge in the digital market. The extensive use of the internet by minors have raised major concern for the parents to look through. Hacking the accounts, using the credentials, putting hurtful remarks, and exploiting children in accomplishing illicit tasks are some of the illegal tactics frequently used by cybercriminals. This claims for an age verification solution to be embedded to protect minors in the virtual gaming sector.
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Imposing Age-Restrictions on Gambling Sites
The promotion of gambling games through add-on has proven to be a major factor in leading to astray minors towards them. Although gambling has been considered legal in a few countries, there are laws in various countries which prohibit children to play such games. For age verification online, many sites offer checking boxes, where the user is asked to confirm if they are above the legal age, which can be easily dodged by teenagers by filling in false information and hence gain quick access to the betting game. Validating the user’s age should be a mandatory step before they are onboarded in the gaming zone.
Why There Is a Requirement For Online Age Verification?
Protecting minors from age-restricted online gaming sites is essential for making the virtual arena a safer place of entertainment for gamers. But it is critical to note the reasons upon which an age check needs to be imposed on children:
- Exposure to Explicit Content
The vulnerability of explicit content can verily affect the minds of minors. Many games have an age-restricted rule upon which they restrict children from purchasing the game from the online store due to exposure to the crude imagery and violent graphics. But putting age checks is not enough, as they can bypass them easily by downloading from the gaming links available on various websites. Those crashed links can further lead them to install malware on their systems through which fraudsters can invade the gaming account of the users and steal their information.
- Content Presented to Children is not Safe
Gaming developers are introducing new kinds of games for children on a routine basis. Many games allow the option of chatting online now in which minors interact with strangers who might trick them to download a specific game consisting of explicit content. This means that a child might be seen playing an innocent simple game yet the situation might go different at any stage. Especially, multi-player-role-playing games can cause them to get exposed to adultery content opening exploring various features of the game.
- Sharing Private Information
Tricking minors online is an effortless task. Bribing the child by offering a crashed link to have access to unlimited features of the game is a nasty technique of fraudsters. Spamming them with a pop-up message, which eventually directs them to a sign-in kind of page in which they fill out all of their personal information. Unrevealing details about their parent’s bank account, address, confidential information might cause damage worth thousands of dollars.
Protecting Minors with KYCC
Installing malicious malware, phishing emails, conducting fake international calls, and impersonating the identity of others are all crimes that are inflicted on the e-gaming platform. Not knowing with whom minors are connecting online is another significant problem. Operating from an anonymous profile can be used against the user by bullying them or asking them for money. While to stop all this, KYCC (Know Your Customer’s Customer) allows the gaming developers to know who their customers are engaging with digitally. This will enable the firms to filter out suspicious third-party associations which can provide harm to the gaming business as well as the user.
Also read: Why Computer Repair is No Longer a Specialist Trade
Wrapping it Up
Fraudsters try their best to pry on the trusting naive nature of the children and trick them into conducting illicit cybercrimes. There are a ton of reasons upon which an age verification solution is needed to be enforced. Chatting from an anonymous profile can make an identity suspicious and pose a risk of fraud. To verify age, KYCC has created opportunities to detect criminals in real-time. This reduction of cybercriminals will lead the gaming developers to execute a safer customer gaming experience which will enhance their brand image in the online market. So, therefore minors need to get their age verified to alter any chances of falling into the tricks of scammers.