Date: 28 May 2025
Online gambling is a massive industry. The global online gambling market size was estimated at 78.66 billion U.S. dollars in 2024 and is predicted to grow at a CAGR of 11.9% from 2025 to 2030. As more and more gambling moves online, they’re a goldmine for cybercriminals hoping to make a quick buck through scams, hacking, and fraud. Savvy hackers can get user data, payment information, and back-end systems if they are not careful.
The need to build trust with customers and keep catastrophic breaches from happening can only be achieved with a specialised payment infrastructure that makes cybersecurity a core facet. At the heart of this infrastructure lies a secure, efficient casino payment gateway, which is the critical conduit for sensitive financial data. This article will analyse the unique risks facing online casinos and sportsbooks, the cybersecurity challenges of handling payments, and why dedicated expertise is now mission-critical.
The Rapid Rise of Online Gambling
Online gambling is expanding at a breakneck pace. Globally, Statista predicts that the market is forecast to rise to 120 billion U.S. dollars by 2029.
Several key factors are fuelling this growth:
- Smartphone and internet penetration make betting easily accessible anywhere, anytime.
- Advances like live in-play allow real-time betting on ongoing sports matches.
- Cryptocurrency and e-payments enable fast and convenient digital transactions.
- Regulation and legalisation in countries like the US create legitimacy and consumer protection.
As New York, Connecticut, and Louisiana join a growing list of states where online sports betting and casinos are legal, there are billions of dollars in fresh revenue at stake. Las Vegas is now being disrupted by companies that use technology in their gambling services.
Nonetheless, there is a downside: Rapid platform growth makes it hard to keep security up to date. Actually, cyberattacks in online gambling are distinct, and the cybersecurity group may not know about them without proper training.
The Unique Cybersecurity Challenges Facing Online Gambling
Online gambling faces three primary cybersecurity challenges lacking in traditional casinos:
- Inherent remote vulnerability from internet-facing systems.
- Sophisticated fraud and hacking driven by large financial flows.
- High payment throughput straining transaction integrity.
- Internet-facing vulnerability.
All online platforms inherently carry remote cyber attack risks that physical facilities do not. Phishing campaigns, malware, credential stuffing, DDoS attacks, and more are disturbingly common, often automated from vast botnets.
According to the research, in June 2023, only 25% of all gambling sites were hit with DDoS attacks. Without robust firewalls, layered safeguards, and constant vigilance, hackers from anywhere in the world can target vulnerabilities.
A lack of cybersecurity can result in public failures. During 2019, an unguarded Elasticsearch server put the betting records, account data and ID documents of 1.3 million Betway users at risk. When such things happen, it greatly reduces how much people trust the company.
Follow-the-Money Attacks
Online gambling has vast financial flows, which makes it uniquely attractive to sophisticated cyber gangs. Between these two, e-commerce firms lose more than $130 billion every year to payment card fraud.
Because online casinos have high roller VIP accounts with large balances ready to be withdrawn illegally. In 2021, PlayStar Casino saw 40 player accounts hacked and $1.6 million stolen before alarms triggered.
Attackers may also target operational wallets. Cryptocurrency presents both huge upside and risks - the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US, Coinbase, revealed that a recent cyber-attack could cost between $180 million and $400 million.
Payment Strain
One of the main benefits of online gambling is the ability to pay and collect money fast so you can bet and win in real time. Since a lot of money moves through these new channels every month, there is very little room for mistakes.
If punters press ‘Bet Now,’ all the links in the chain—from customer to merchant provider to payment processor—must be secure to prevent huge losses. Even so, when systems are overloaded, security can suffer, which the FastPay casino group found out when $3.8 million in debit payments disappeared.
Such mistakes in operations cause people to lose trust in the company. Because of outages, online gambling operators missed out on an estimated $735 million in business in 2021.
If new entrants face huge volumes of transactions and lack the knowledge needed, the question is when, not if, they will suffer a financial disaster.
Why Dedicated Payment Infrastructure and Cybersecurity are Now Mission-Critical
Many incumbent online gambling platforms began life as retail betting shops or land-based casinos. Their core expertise lies in odds setting, marketing, and operations, not in technology.
But the modern reality is that sportsbooks and internet casinos now run on software. Their infrastructure underpins the entire customer experience, from login to bet placement to cashing out winnings.
And with crippling hacks now a weekly news item, consumer-facing brands can ill afford being associated with lax security - it destroys trust and loyalty.
Visionary disruptors entering this high-growth space must make security a top priority from day one across their technology stack, including:
- Data and access management.
- Application security.
- Business continuity and disaster recovery.
- Cloud and infrastructure security.
- Endpoint and account control.
- Network security.
However, the payments domain poses unique threats. Without resilience here, nothing else matters - one breach can wipe out revenue gains for years.
Specialised payment expertise is essential because of:
- The extreme cyber crime focuses on routes to money.
- Payments’ role of a bloodstream for the business.
- The flawless reliability customers expect.
4 Key Capabilities Required for Payment Security
What, then, does effective payment security for online gambling entail in 2025 and beyond?
Platform operators must prioritise capabilities across four key domains:
Robust Fraud Detection
Having advanced tools is necessary to find both common payment fraud and scams that target online gambling bonuses.
By using machine learning, experts are able to find fraud that is hard for humans to notice. Having multiple security steps protects your account from being taken over.
At the time of registration, protocols that confirm a customer’s identity and prove their age cut down on risks.
Real-Time Transaction Monitoring
Every payment transaction should undergo near-instant risk scoring for approval. Monitoring for anomalies at scale requires optimized algorithms.
The ability to get notifications from automated dashboards allows fraud teams to deal with threats early on. Using data from other cyber threat sources improves the ability to act before threats happen.
Future-Proofed Processing Capacity
Elastic infrastructure means the site can handle lots of traffic during sports and casino events without suffering outages.
Using containerisation, micro-services, and cloud-agnostic designs stops monoliths from being overwhelmed.
Load testing large systems should always be done to confirm their stability. When infrastructure fails, it hurts a company’s ability to earn revenue.
Resilient Up-time and Redundancy
All important payment systems must be designed with redundancy and continuous availability to avoid any one failure point.
If problems are contained in one area, they usually do not spread to other areas. With decentralised systems, regions are protected from severe disruption.
Disaster recovery protocols help a business minimise the time needed to recover. Because bets can still be lost when there are outages, software should be designed to be resilient.
Why Outsource to Payment Specialists?
While fraud protection, performance at scale, and resilience may sound straightforward in theory, specialized expertise is required for effective execution.
We have explored the foundations of a secure payment environment for online gambling operators. But the reality of building this requires significant technical talent and experience.
For operators focused on product, marketing, and operations rather than wanting to become a cybersecurity vendor themselves, partnering with dedicated payment infrastructure experts is the wise path.
Specialist payment companies live and breathe to deal with issues like:
- Localised fraud patterns for global jurisdictions.
- Optimised rulesets to prevent false positives.
- Compliance with complex gambling regulations.
- Uptime SLAs stricter than merchant banks.
Seeking out their tailored payment services for the gambling vertical allows brands to focus on growth while externalising risk and security overhead.
This partner-driven approach provides access to pooled talent and 24/7 vigilance required against unrelenting threats.
Payment Security Conclusions
As online gambling increases, the companies responsible for our bets become targets of increasing cyberattacks from gangs interested in the money. Advanced hackers use the internet to commit fraud, steal money, and cause problems for companies.
A lack of proper security makes customers doubtful and increases the risk of an enterprise being punished by financial crime regulations. Still, it takes a lot of specialised knowledge to build a good in-house defence for fraud, up-time, peak capacity, and resilience.
Startups entering the space quickly must always have security in mind, especially when it comes to identity, data, infrastructure, and payments.
Essential services for operators are provided by payment companies focused on the sector. They rely on security experts, who provide specific knowledge about gambling worldwide, so that brands can concentrate on secure progress.
Those who anticipate and design secure payment systems now will be the beneficiaries of the new internet gold rush.
