Lucrative Loopholes: An interview with a professional bonus abuser
When a 13-year-old Ozric Vondervelden realised that he could manipulate registration forms in order to get hundreds of free product samples sent to his house, it was inevitable that his talent for ‘beating the system’ would become a career.
As an adult, he moved on from shop samples to big casinos, using math and ingenuity to exploit bugs in the system, abuse bonuses, and ultimately generate substantial amounts of cash from unsuspecting operators. However, after a decade of evading detection, one major operator eventually figured out what he was up to and tracked him down.
SiGMA News spoke exclusively with Ozric to learn more about his fascinating story and how he went from dodging operators to creating a product that would ultimately help them.
All the chocolate
“I think I was around 13 when I started cheating registration forms using Windows 98. At the time, there were sites that posted out free product samples: chocolate, shampoo, things like that, but you’d only get one per household. I figured that if I made slight changes to the details in the registration form, I was able to get them to post things to my house infinitely.”
He quickly learned that he could then sell the product samples to people by getting them sent directly to the buyers’ addresses. Years later, his method of duplicating accounts was applied to casinos, where the stakes were significantly higher, but so were the rewards.
As his skills grew, so did his business, eventually hiring a team of professional bonus abusers and taking legal advice from a lawyer to ensure they remained within that ambiguous legal grey area.
A mystery wrapped in an enigma
Under the pseudonym ‘Ada Lovelace’, Ozric, alongside his team, spent a decade exploiting the loopholes of hundreds of casinos until 2019, when one of the larger operators eventually caught on to what they were doing.
“They messaged one of my accounts with something along the lines of ‘We don’t know what you’re doing, but you’re gonna come and tell us.’
“It was around this time that we were realising our business might not scale in the right way. I’d just had my daughter and wanted to legitimise my craft, so I agreed to meet with the operator at a hotel bar in London and talk.
“I was nervous at first, thinking it might be a set-up, but when I arrived, I could see that the guy I was meeting was equally terrified. He was also worried it was a set-up.”
When they both realised no one was going to be dragged down a dark alleyway, the operator offered Ozric a consultancy position.
“They wanted to know how we were doing it. They wanted to learn. And for me, what I was doing wasn’t just about money; it was about solving a problem, the intellectual challenge. The thing that excited me the most was finding the loopholes, not necessarily exploiting them. So in terms of working on the operator’s side, it was the same challenge, just more legitimate.”
White (hat) is the new black
After working with the operator for a few months, and saving them millions along the way, Ozric and co-founder, Ed Dickerson, started up the appropriately named Lovelace Consultancy where the team worked with around 40 operators, helping them fix all of the leaking holes where they were losing extortionate amounts of money to bonus abusers.
In 2021, his newly named company, Greco, began working on a cloud-based product solution to prevent bonus abuse.
“There are lots of services for preventing bonus abuse out there already. You have device fingerprinting; looking at cookies and IP information to see if somebody is logging in to more than one account on the same device. Then you have the KYC verification checks. But neither of those product categories are a full solution. Anyone who knows what they’re doing can undermine both of those processes relatively easily.”
A lot of operators have one or two parts in place, but if you don’t have all three, there’s a gap. The cloud-based Greco product focuses entirely on the missing piece: the actual gameplay of the player on the site.
“You can spoof fraud tools, you can spoof verification, but if you are taking value and you’re optimising that value, you can’t hide that; it’s there in the gameplay data. So we’re the last step in risk management, but also the strongest, and we’re the only one in the market offering it.”
Lessons for the industry
For casino operators, Ozric’s story is both a cautionary tale and a useful case study. The bonus systems designed to attract and retain customers can also be manipulated by people with the right skills.
He believes many companies are still exposed without realising it. “Operators will say things like ‘we don’t have a bonus abuse problem,’ and then when you ask them what their definition of bonus abuse is, it’s very outdated. They’re looking for someone creating hundreds of accounts on the same device or something obvious like that.”
He points to broader risks beyond traditional fraud. “It’s often not a question of fraud in the legal sense. It’s more like a value extraction strategy, and it works because operators aren’t thinking like abusers.”
With the rise of AI, you would be forgiven for thinking that today’s advanced tech would make it easier to spot and stop bonus abusers. But, as Ozric explains, it’s actually the opposite.
“Take Chat GPT, for example. It’s accessible to everyone, and one thing it can do is automate the manual processes that would have previously been required. It’s taken a lot of the math and labour out of slot hacking and bonus abuse. So, it’s actually made it much easier; almost every area of these casinos is now more exposed. Operators don’t always know how vulnerable they really are.”
Coming over from the dark side
Today, Ozric’s journey from exploiter to expert has positioned him as one of the few people in the industry who truly understands bonus abuse from both sides. And in an industry where margins matter, that kind of insight is priceless.
He may have started out gaming chocolate samples, but he ended up gaming the entire casino industry, and now he’s helping operators plug the very leaks he once slipped through; proof that you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer, or better yet, hire them.
