Tim French, Greco: “This industry is built on trust and relationships”
Shows & conferences - 24 November, 2025
During the latest edition of SiGMA Central Europe 2025, Focus Gaming News spoke with Tim French, Commercial Manager at Greco, about the evolving geography of bonus abuse, how AI is empowering abusers, Greco’s casino abuse roadmap and real‑time risk engine, the need to move from manual to automated detection, and the company’s objectives at the show.
French said that the nature of bonus abuse itself has not fundamentally changed, since “bonus abuse is a mathematical edge… how to exploit the mathematical value given to an operator.” The underlying abuse patterns remain similar, but the geography has shifted as markets mature. Historically, activity was concentrated in places such as Finland, the UK and other parts of Europe; now Greco is “seeing it really explode over in Eastern Europe” and seeing it “pop up around Asia.”
He noted that there are “so many different angles” to bonus abuse, including organised operations. Some groups are “legitimate companies as well because they’re just circumnavigating the terms and conditions that have been put in place by the operator,” and, if they can bypass standard risk and fraud tools, “you can make a lot, a lot of money from bonus abuse.”
French highlighted strong growth in the number of operators integrating Greco’s gameplay risk engine, including via partners such as Fast Track. The company’s main technical focus is now on completing its casino abuse roadmap. “Once we’ve done that, we will have all of the mathematical behaviours of casino abuse set in place,” he explained. This will allow Greco to quantify “the value of what your player looks like” and support more accurate segmentation. The aim is to show operators that a customer who looks on paper like a VIP – “they are high stakes, they’re high wagering, they might wager a million in a month” – may in reality be “playing to such an optimised fashion that they have no intention to give any value back to the operator. They’re just there to take as much as they can.”
Operators are often “so scared to re‑segment those players” because of headline KPIs such as turnover and GGR. French argued that this mind‑set is short‑sighted: “By letting them do this, it’s then going to affect their NGR because they’re not going to profit out of these players.” Greco’s role is to provide the clarity and confidence needed to act.
Beyond pure detection, Greco also wants to act as a deterrent. French said the company’s ambition is clear: “We fundamentally want to get their bonus abuse levels down to zero and maintain it.” A successful partnership means that operators can “really go out with higher risk offers” and “feel comfortable with what you’re doing,” knowing that any “little bit of a spike” in abuse will be caught “instantly.” He illustrated the deterrent effect with tagging data: “If I see that we’ve tagged 100 bonus abusers in month one and then 50 in month two, it’s the deterrent because bonus abusers aren’t going to waste their time going to a site that they know they can never win on.”
French warned that AI is changing the nature of the threat. The “upskilling has accelerated” because powerful tools are “so accessible to everyone now.” He pointed out that “you could go on to ChatGPT and type in how to make money from a casino,” and, with the right prompts, “you can start reverse engineering it like bonus abusers do” to identify ways to “circumnavigate the processes that are put in place by the operators.” Previously, knowledge was concentrated in specialist forums, syndicates or “a friend of a friend”; now, “theoretically anybody on the street can go on to ChatGPT and have all of the information at their fingertips,” which he believes is “the problem that operators are going to face.”
Reflecting on the past year, French cited the “level of operators that we’ve been integrating” and Greco’s strong growth as key milestones. Working across more operators and jurisdictions allows the company to “start kind of seeing the trends and what’s happening.” He emphasised that Greco was “born out of consultants” and remains “consultants at the heart of everything,” with a mission “to train and educate the market in terms of how to identify bonus abuse. Our tool just automates that whole process.” Despite iGaming being a “tech‑led industry,” he described it as “insane but completely understandable how much of a manual process this still is,” especially in terms of how data is used and processes are automated. Greco aims to “empower operators to be more efficient, be better, be quicker” and to “look at bonus abuse as a proactive solution, not a reactive solution.”
As for SiGMA Central Europe, French said Greco’s main objectives were to meet new operators and reconnect with existing partners at the last major industry gathering of the year. The event is “that final touch point… the last time that we’re all together under one roof,” where companies discuss plans for the coming year and “the buzz of what’s to come.” Maintaining visibility and relationships is crucial because, as he put it, “this industry is built on trust and relationships. And if you can’t be in front of people building up that relationship, then the trust never follows either.”