Sorare enlists SEON to enhance fraud prevention capabilities

Fantasy football platform Sorare has entered into a partnership with SEON, leveraging the latter’s solutions to detect fraud within its referral programme.

The agreement will see Sorare utilise SEON’s onboarding monitoring, device fingerprinting and tailored risk rules offerings to identify and prevent referral fraud and protect its Non-Fungible Token portfolio.

Solutions included under the terms of the partnership include Email API, Phone API, IP API and Device Monitoring as part of SEON’s Fraud API package, centred around Sorare’s referral programme, which rewards fantasy team managers for actively recruiting new members to their club.

Tamas Kadar, Co-Founder and CEO of SEON, remarked: “Sorare is innovating and driving the future of NFTs with its blockchain collectibles. We worked closely with the Sorare team to identify vulnerabilities and create tailor specific rules and risk scores using our comprehensive Fraud API to detect and prevent abuse in their unique platform.”

Operating as a fantasy football and NFT platform and backed by Japan’s SoftBank via a $680 million funding round, Sorare’s customers buy and sell official licensed digital tokenised cards representing football players and use these to compete against each other in fantasy leagues.

Cards are registered as unique tokens and are recorded on the Ethereum blockchain in order to ensure authenticity, and the company maintains partnerships with 180 football teams, leagues and associations, including clubs such as Liverpool, Real Madrid, Juventus, Spain’s LaLiga and Germany’s Bundesliga.

The firm was recently placed under investigation by the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC), however, with the regulatory authority issuing a public declaration that Sorare does not hold a British gambling licence.

In response to the UKGC’s declaration, Sorare maintained that its services consist of allowing players to compete in fantasy football leagues by purchasing fixed-price player cards, although acknowledging that there is an exchange element to its business model.

“Sorare has an advanced platform built on new, powerful technologies like blockchain,” said Brian O’Hagan, Growth Lead at Sorare. “Traditional fraud platforms, built for old enterprise networks just didn’t make sense for the speed and scale of our business.

“We were able to quickly get up and running with the SEON Customer Success team, which we now count on as our fraud team.”