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SBC Summit Lisbon returns from 29 September to 1 October, bringing around 40,000 industry professionals, more than 600 speakers, and over 800 exhibitors to the Feira Internacional de Lisboa and MEO Arena. New this year is a dedicated Player Protection Symposium, bringing together regulators, operators, responsible gaming specialists, and technology providers.
Gamecheck founder James Elliott opens the symposium with his session, 'Innovation in tech: how can technology keep players safe from harm?', on Wednesday 30 September from 11am to 11:40am. The symposium will explore three themes: regulation versus the black market, the operator's role in safeguarding players, and technology's part in identifying and supporting at-risk players.
Online casino operators, game providers, and regulators attending the summit can meet the Gamecheck team at Gamecheck Stand PP100 in the Player Protection Zone. Operators who visit the stand will receive the Gamecheck SEAL at no cost for their first month, with standard pricing applying after that.
Walk into almost any session on technology and player harm this year, at SBC Lisbon, and the conversation will be about behavioural analytics. Spotting the players whose session patterns look risky. Flagging changes in deposit frequency, session length, chasing behaviour. Building models that catch a problem before the player themselves would name it. Vendors will demo dashboards. Operators will talk about risk scores and early intervention. It is a mature part of the industry now, with real investment behind it.
This work matters, but it answers only one question: is this player showing signs of harm. It says nothing about a deeper question the industry rarely asks: is the game in front of them even real.
A player with completely healthy session data, sensible limits, no red flags anywhere in their behaviour, can still be playing a fake game. Their session looks fine because the analytics measuring it were never built to catch this. They were built to watch the player, not the product.
That gap is what Gamecheck spends its time on, and the scale of it is worth stating plainly rather than gesturing at. Gamecheck monitors more than 43,500 online casinos worldwide and has completed over 257,600 checks to date, identifying more than 10,000 fake games in the process. In Brazil alone, Gamecheck identified 5,000 fake online casinos in the first half of this year, and a ten-part investigation working through the first 500 of those found the same patterns holding again and again: short-lived, alphanumeric domains built to be replaced quickly, interfaces polished enough to pass for established platforms, and templates reused across dozens of operators with only minor variations between them.
None of that shows up in a behavioural model. A player interacting with one of those operators can look, on paper, like a model of healthy play. The harm is happening at a different layer entirely, in what is actually running behind the interface, not in how the player is behaving in front of it.
Behavioural analytics can flag a player's tenth bet in ten minutes. It cannot tell the operator, or the player, that the slot behind that bet is not the game they think they are spinning. These are two different risks, and only one has an industry-wide effort to measure it at present.
Trust in this industry usually gets framed as a two-way relationship, between player and operator. It is really a three-way relationship, player, operator, and the game itself, and that third leg is the one almost nobody is checking. An operator can be entirely well-intentioned and still have no reliable way of knowing whether a game running on their own platform matches the version the provider actually built. Trust that does not extend to the product itself is trust built on an assumption, not a check.
This is the argument James will open the symposium with: player protection technology needs to work on two layers at once. Behavioural signals tell you about the player. A second, separate layer needs to tell you whether what they are playing is real, and that second layer gets a fraction of the industry's attention.
Gamecheck's tools are built to be simple enough that a player does not need to understand the technology behind them to use them. The Gamecheck Search Tool takes an online casino's web address and returns a clear result: real games in operation, fake games detected, or a check still pending.
The Gamecheck Chrome Extension does the same thing live, while a player is browsing without leaving the page. The Gamecheck app goes one step further for operators committed to offering real games, letting players scan an active Gamecheck SEAL. This doesn't replace the work that behavioural analytics already does. It works alongside it, filling in a gap that behavioural analytics was never built to fill.
You'll find the Gamecheck team at Stand PP100 in the Player Protection Zone, just outside the Player Protection Hub Lounge on the right-hand side and next to the food court. Operators who visit the stand during the event will receive the Gamecheck SEAL at no cost for their first month, with standard pricing applying after that. To book a meeting with the team ahead of the event, email sales@gamecheck.com.
The Player Protection Symposium sits inside SBC's six-stage conference agenda, and its purpose is bigger than one panel. It is built to help the industry move from a compliance mindset to a preventative one, working through three areas: balancing regulatory objectives against the black market, the operator's role in safeguarding players, and technology's role in identifying and supporting at-risk players. James opens the symposium on the third of those, on Wednesday 30 September from 11am to 11:40am.
Beyond the conference stage, the Player Protection Zone gives attendees a hands-on look at the tools behind this argument, including Gamecheck's. Every operator carrying a Gamecheck SEAL displays a tamper-proof badge confirming that a selection of their games are checked and real, and the zone is where you can see that process end to end, from the check itself through to the player-facing moment of trust. The Gamecheck Search Tool, Chrome Extension, app, and Gamecheck SEAL will all be there to try directly.
The Gamecheck team will be on the ground and available at Stand PP100 throughout the event:
Rosa Ochoa, who leads Gamecheck's business development across Latin America, will not be in Lisbon but is reachable directly for Spanish-speaking operators.
The industry's technology conversation has spent years getting better at understanding the player. That work should continue, and Gamecheck has no interest in reopening it. What James will argue at SBC Summit Lisbon is that the conversation is incomplete while it stops there. A healthy session is not proof of a fair one. Until player protection technology checks both layers, the player and the product, a real gap in harm detection stays open underneath data that looks fine.
This is not a call for a new category of tool that does not exist yet. Gamecheck's Search Tool, Chrome Extension, and app already do this work today, at scale, across more than 43,500 online casinos. The technology to close this gap is available now. What is missing is the industry-wide attention that behavioural analytics has already earned, applied to the question of whether the product itself is real.
If you're planning to attend, visit the Gamecheck Stand PP100 in the Player Protection Zone, located outside near the food court - grab a bite to eat and join us for a chat on how Gamecheck's tools can improve player trust on your platform. Also keep a look out for our founder James Elliott's session opening the Player Protection Symposium, on Wednesday 30 September at 11am. For everyone else, the Search Tool is available now, and checking whether an online casino's games are real takes seconds.
Visit Gamecheck at Stand PP100 and receive the Gamecheck SEAL at no cost for your first month. To book a meeting with the team ahead of the event, email sales@gamecheck.com.
Published On: Sep 24, 2026
Updated On: Sep 25, 2026
When and where is James Elliott speaking at SBC Summit Lisbon?
James Elliott opens the Player Protection Symposium with his session, 'Innovation in Tech: How Can Technology Keep Players Safe from Harm?', on Wednesday 30 September from 11am to 11:40am.
Why isn't behavioural analytics enough to protect players?
Behavioural analytics can flag risky session patterns, but it only checks the player, not the product. A player can show completely healthy session data while still playing a fake game, since that harm happens at the level of the game itself, not in how the player behaves.
Where can I try Gamecheck's tools at the event?
The Gamecheck team can be found at Stand PP100 in the Player Protection Zone, where you can try the Gamecheck Search Tool, Chrome Extension, App, and Gamecheck SEAL directly. Jack Crabtree, Head of Sales, is the first point of contact for operators looking to bring the Gamecheck SEAL onto their platform, and Elizabeth McDermott, Partnerships Manager, and Umur Ozan, Creative Strategist are also on hand to answer your questions.
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