Online chess has grown in popularity over the past year as people found new ways to pass the time during COVID-19 lockdowns. With another jolt from the award-winning Netflix miniseries The Queen's Gambit, the sport brought in millions of new players and re-engaged old fans rediscovering their love of the game built around strategy, precision, skill and competitiveness. However, this feel-good renaissance also featured a darker side that likely won't come as a surprise to those in the online gaming community.

One household brand impacted by both the good and the bad is Chess.com, which has more than 30 million active users. The user-friendly company is dedicated to fostering a sense of community and trustworthiness among players who compete from points all over the globe. Unfortunately, cheating in its many forms has plagued online gaming sites for years. An increase in active users on Chess.com also meant more cheaters in the game.

Tracking an increase in bots and fake users, Chess.com understood early on the problems that could result and impacts on their entire community if they didn't act swiftly and decisively to continually thwart fraud and ensure to its users a sense of fair play. Responding diligently to blatant fraud and online corruption was one of the driving forces behind the creation of IPQualityScore, a fraud detection system used by many Fortune 500 companies to detect and thwart illicit online behavior. With software tools created by ex-NSA developers, IPQS offers a level of insight into fraudulent activity that few other services can match. Chess.com chose IPQualityScore to help level the board for its millions of users.

Whether it is using a chess engine for assistance, multi-accounting, sandbagging or other forms of rating manipulation, cheating at online chess has become something a constant cat-and-mouse game for those looking to gain advantages over others playing the game as it was meant to be played. Online cheating has been so rampant that it has affected almost every level in the sport. Even grandmasters have had their accounts closed down because of nefarious actions online. Sadly, the great game has been sullied by the actions of more than a few win-at-all-costs players.

Working together, Chess.com and IPQualityScore challenged the tide of online cheaters to help restore the notion of safe gaming and fair play and assuring their players that they are competing against human competition, not bots or fraudsters. Chess.com needed help to identify irregularities, block bots, reduce fake users and duplicate accounts and thwart fraudulent behavior. While staying ahead is a never-ending battle, IPQualityScore helped Chess.com create a fairer gaming environment. On average, IPQualityScore blocks 750 proxies, bots and VPNs a month for the online gaming platform. In addition, several thousand fake accounts a day are thwarted and blocked, while another few thousand instances of users trying to create multiple accounts are stopped on a daily basis.

With IPQS's Proxy Detection API, websites and companies like Chess.com can instantly reduce fraud, tapping into the company's real-time threat detection solution. For each lookup, an IP address and other forensic factors of the connection are analyzed to determine if the user is hiding behind a spoofed or anonymized IP, tunneled connection, botnet or attempting to frequently change their device. Over 25 data points are returned for each Proxy Detection API lookup to provide a detailed risk assessment of the click, user, or transaction. Ranging from fake installs, click fraud, chargebacks and bots to duplicate accounts and similar abuses, IPQualityFraud helps safeguard companies from users with bad intentions.

That's a sort of checkmate for fraudsters that any business could use. 

Previously the founder of an advertising firm, Dennis Weiss started IPQualityScore to take on the rampant fraud he witnessed creating and implementing email marketing and lead generation campaigns on behalf of clients. In response, Weiss worked with David Mackler, IPQS's Chief Technology Officer to create one of the world's most proactive weapons against fraud. IPQS works with clients in the fintech, eCommerce, digital media, online dating and cryptocurrency industries. The company's industry-leading fraud protection strategies were designed by a team of ex-NSA programmers.