We didn’t want to cause offence to friends or relatives by marketing to deceased people. We also wanted to remove potential fraudsters who might have created an account using stolen details or taken over a deceased person’s account.
Claudia Farrugia
Head of Operations, MrQ.
The customer
MrQ is an online casino offering live casino, slots and bingo games to the UK market. MrQ is operated by TekFox, which is licensed and regulated by the UK Gambling Commission, and prioritises regulatory compliance and invests in best-practice data quality management.
The challenge
MrQ was planning to run a series of marketing campaigns to existing customers but first wanted to ensure its database was clean.
“We didn’t want to cause offence to friends or relatives by marketing to deceased people,” says Claudia Farrugia, Head of Operations at MrQ. “We also wanted to remove potential fraudsters who might have created an account using stolen details or taken over a deceased person’s account.”
The solution
MrQ turned to us, its longstanding identity verification and location intelligence partner, to cleanse its database. We already verify tens of thousands of new customers for MrQ every month using a combination of services.
As new customers enter their details for MrQ, our location intelligence solution, GBG Loqate, rapidly returns a list of possible matching addresses to choose from. That makes onboarding faster and easier, while capturing accurate addresses in a standardised format ready for matching.
MrQ itself then checks the addresses in real time against the GAMSTOP self-exclusion file and also against its customer database.
“We want to block duplicates to prevent fraud, but also to protect any problem gamblers who might try to create a second account,” explains Claudia.
Our identity solution then verifies new applicants’ IDs against a wide range of reference datasets, including mortality files. To maximise pass rates while ensuring compliance, MrQ uses our multibureau capabilities, along with Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) and Sanctions checks.
At the start of 2025, our team had cleaned MrQ’s customer database, matching it against a range of deceased suppression files.
The outcome
Results immediately showed that 89 “deceased” customers were still gaming on MrQ. MrQ promptly suspended these suspected fraudulent accounts, allowing time to conduct further verification checks.
“We removed all of them from outbound marketing immediately to comply with safer gambling best practice,” says Claudia. “For those that were still active after their supposed deceased date, we’ve deactivated their accounts and emailed to ask for documentation to prove their identities. But I don’t expect to hear from many of them.”
“GBG has helped us minimise any fraud or compliance risk,” says Claudia, “just like they help us collect accurate customer data, verify identities and increase pass rates with its multibureau capabilities. Whether it’s optimising our matching and scoring customer risk or the detailed reports that help us understand our customer segments, they are an experienced and competent data partner.”
