It's both, but the velocity trigger is usually the sharper knife. Most setups I saw flagged deposits hitting 70-80% of a customer's verified monthly net income within a rolling 7-day window, or three deposits in 24 hours once you'd already crossed your historical weekly average. The history-based stuff was softer, more for retention teams to nudge you with "are you sure" pop-ups; the hard flags that landed on my desk were nearly always income-velocity breaches that the system calculated against the last verified payslip or tax record on file.
70-80% In a week off one payslip — that feels like a blunt instrument. What about the guys who deposit steady, same amount every friday, but its clearly more than they make? Ever see the system catch slow-bleed patterns, or was it all just velocity alarms?
Slow-bleed patterns were the nightmare, honestly. The system I worked on had a "sustained exceedance" model that theoretically flagged when cumulative deposits over 30 days passed a percentage of declared income, but the thresholds were set so loose that you'd need to be dropping 120-150% of monthly net before it auto-escalated — by which point most players had already reversed a withdrawal or two. I saw plenty of cases where someone was clearly funding gambling through undisclosed credit or side income we couldn't verify, but without a velocity spike or a manual complaint, those accounts just sat in the green. We had one guy who deposited exactly £200 every Friday for eleven months — turned out he was a courier using a business account we never flagged because the name matched. Only caught him when his wife emailed customer support.
Self-exclusion on one site only hits that specific licence holder — or sometimes just that skin, depending on how the operator groups their brands. If DragonSlots and GoldenCrown sit under different licences, or even just different backend setups with no shared player database, the system won't blink when you register fresh. The only thing that actually travels is a GAMSTOP block if you're UK-based, and even then I've seen crypto-heavy books that barely check it.
Crypto-only books I dealt with were basically KYC-light by design. They'd run a liveness check and maybe a PEP screen, but affordability was "source of funds optional" — only triggered if you tried to convert back to fiat through a partner processor or hit a withdrawal threshold that tripped the network's compliance layer. The real checks happened at the off-ramp, not the table.
