{"slug":"quago-builds-ml-behavioral-analytics-on-databricks-to-detect-fraud-and-cheating-in-online-games","url":"https://findausecase.com/use-cases/quago-builds-ml-behavioral-analytics-on-databricks-to-detect-fraud-and-cheating-in-online-games","title":"Quago builds ML behavioral analytics on Databricks to detect fraud and cheating in online games","description":"Quago analyzes over 200 device-sensor data points per player swipe using machine learning models built on Databricks Delta Lake and Spark to detect cheating, churn and user-acquisition fraud in real time for gaming companies. Migrating from a vanilla Parquet data lake to Databricks let Quago run SQL queries 4x faster, reduced customers' server costs by an estimated 25%, and is projected to save gaming companies tens of millions of dollars in in-app purchase fraud losses.","company":"Quago","industry":"Media & Entertainment","aiCapabilities":["Fraud & Anomaly Detection","Machine Learning"],"technology":["Databricks SQL","Delta Lake","Apache Spark"],"deployment":"Public Cloud","problemStatement":"Quago originally used a vanilla Parquet lake that was costly to scale due to performance, storage efficiency and query optimization challenges, and struggled with cost-effective scaling and the resource-intensive nature of managing infrastructure for both performance and availability with a small engineering team.","solutionApproach":"Quago migrated its data pipeline into Databricks Delta Lake, using Databricks SQL and Apache Spark on top of Delta Lake to build, retrain and launch ML fraud, cheating and churn-detection models, updating models per customer and app as often as three times a week.","businessValue":"Quago achieved 4x faster SQL queries compared to its previous vanilla Parquet lake, reduced customers' server costs by up to 25%, and estimates its fraud mitigation will reduce customer in-app purchase losses by tens of millions of dollars, while keeping a small, efficient engineering team.","evidence":{"band":"high"},"sourceUrl":"https://www.databricks.com/customers/quago","dates":{"publishedAt":"2026-09-16T09:05:19.754Z","publishedAtSource":"pipeline","updatedAt":"2026-09-16T09:05:19.754Z"},"license":"Open for reading and citing with a link to https://findausecase.com/use-cases/quago-builds-ml-behavioral-analytics-on-databricks-to-detect-fraud-and-cheating-in-online-games. Bulk republication requires permission."}