Gambling licence registers
A licence is the only consumer protection in online gambling that somebody other than the casino can enforce. These pages cover the three regulators that matter for the operators we review: what each one actually obliges a licensee to do, and — where we hold a copy of its register — how many records that copy contains and when it was pulled.
This is the register side. The ranked list of casinos holding a British licence is a separate page: UK licensed casinos. To check one site right now, use the licence tool.
UKGC
MIRROR LIVEMGA
NOT MIRROREDCuraçao CGA
NOT MIRROREDThe UK Gambling Commission publishes its register as bulk files, so a copy can carry a source URL, a fetch date, a row count and a checksum. Malta and Curaçao publish one-query verification tools instead. We would rather show an empty mirror and tell you where to check yourself than assemble figures whose origin we could not state — which is the same standard we apply to everything else on this site, described in our rating method.
What a mirrored register gives you that a badge does not
A licence badge in a footer is an image. It can be copied from another site, kept after a licence lapses, or displayed by an operator that never held one — and none of those is detectable by looking at it.
A register entry is different in kind. It names the company that holds the licence, the licences it holds and their status, the domains those licences cover and the trading names it operates under. It is published by the regulator, it changes when the licence changes, and it can be checked by anyone.
We mirror the UKGC register in full and match every casino in our catalogue to it by licensed domain. That match is the entry condition for appearing anywhere on this site, and it is re-run on a schedule rather than at the moment we wrote a review — so an operator whose licence lapses drops out of the lists without anybody here having to notice.
Why two of these registers are empty, and why we say so
The pages here cover three regulators, and only one of them has a mirror behind it. The UKGC publishes bulk data — companies, licences, domains, trading names — which is what makes everything else on this site possible.
Malta and Curaçao do not publish comparable bulk downloads. Their pages here print "mirror empty" and explain why, rather than implying coverage we do not have. That is a deliberate choice: a page that lists a regulator without saying it holds no data would suggest we can check a Maltese licence the way we check a British one, and we cannot.
It is also why this site is UK-first rather than global. The claim we make — every listed casino verified against a public register — is only true in a market where the register exists and is downloadable. Extending the catalogue to a jurisdiction without one would mean quietly weakening the claim on every page.
The provenance we publish for every dataset
Each mirrored dataset records where it came from, when it was fetched, how many rows it contained and a checksum of the file. That is printed on the register pages rather than kept in a database, because a claim about data is worth what its provenance is worth.
Of the competitors we measured while building this site, none publishes provenance for the licence data it displays. Several display licence numbers with no indication of when they were last checked, which is the same problem as an undated bonus term: a fact that was true once, presented as though it were true now.
The same principle governs the enforcement register we mirror alongside it. Each case carries its published date and amount, read from the regulator's own article rather than from a summary, and each appears on the review of every brand whose licensee it belongs to.
A licence and a clean record are different questions
The most common mistake made with register data is to treat "licensed" as the end of the enquiry. It is the beginning of one. A licence establishes that a named company is authorised and supervised; it says nothing about whether that company has been found wanting.
The regulator publishes both. The register says who is licensed; the enforcement feed says who has been penalised, for what, and how much. Almost every site in this market publishes a version of the first and none of the second, which leaves a reader with half the public record.
We mirror both, and tie each enforcement case to the licensee named in the register rather than to a brand. That matters because a penalty is imposed on a company, and a company frequently operates many brands — so a case that made headlines under one name belongs on the review of every site that company runs.
The effect is that several casinos in this catalogue hold entirely valid, current licences and carry multi-million-pound settlements against their licensees. Both facts are true simultaneously, both are printed, and neither cancels the other.
What we do with a register that changes daily
The Commission publishes its register files daily, and licences lapse, transfer and are surrendered without announcement. A mirror taken once and left alone would look identical to a current one, which is precisely why the date of the snapshot is printed next to every count on this site.
The import runs on a schedule and the match against our catalogue runs immediately afterwards on success — never on a partially downloaded file, because matching against an incomplete register silently unlinks operators that are perfectly well licensed.
When an operator stops resolving to an active licence, it drops out of every ranked list here automatically and its review page carries an explicit notice instead of a score. No editor decides that, which is the point: a gate that depends on somebody remembering is not a gate.