UK Gambling Commission: What Our Mirror of the Register Holds

Why the domain is the field that matters

The register is searchable by company, by trading name and by domain, and those three answer different questions. A company name tells you who holds the licence. A trading name tells you what that company is allowed to call itself. The domain tells you whether the specific website in front of you is covered — and it is the field a copied footer badge cannot fake.

That is why our own licence tool searches on the domain first and treats a name match as weaker evidence. An unlicensed site can call itself anything; getting a domain into the Commission's domain list requires actually holding a licence.

The other reason to search by domain is what it reveals sideways. A licensee frequently operates many brands, and the register returns them all. A new casino you have never heard of may share a licence number with one whose complaints history is worth reading — which is exactly the connection a badge in a footer is designed not to show you.

What our mirror is, and what it is not

We import four published CSV files — businesses, licences, domain names and trading names — record where each came from, when it was fetched, how many rows it held and the sha256 of the payload, then match the operators in our catalogue against it by licensed domain and trading name.

It is a copy, and a copy is always behind the original. The Commission updates daily; our snapshot is as old as the timestamp in the table on this page. For anything that matters — a deposit, a dispute, a large withdrawal — check the Commission's own register, which is free and public and linked from this page.

A business that disappears from the register between imports is not deleted here. It is marked as no longer listed, because the fact that a licensee used to be there and is not any more is information worth keeping rather than erasing.

Reading a licence status honestly

A licence line carries a status, and the difference between them is the difference between an enforceable relationship and a historical one. Active means live now. Surrendered, lapsed or revoked all mean the operator no longer answers to the regulator for that activity, and revoked in particular is a regulatory outcome rather than an administrative one.

Our rule on the rest of the site follows from that: a casino cannot enter a ranked list unless a licence we can find in a public register is active, with a number and a date of the check. It is the one criterion that is a gate as well as a score, and it is the reason a category here sometimes publishes an empty list.

What the register cannot tell you is whether an active licence is about to stop being one. Enforcement action appears in the Commission's public notices, not in the licence line, so a clean entry today can sit alongside a fine issued last month. The register is a floor, not a verdict.

How to check a casino in thirty seconds

The check is faster than reading anyone's summary of it, including ours.

• Take the domain from your browser's address bar, not from the site's marketing copy.
• Search it on the Commission's public register, or on our mirror through the licence tool.
• Confirm three things: the domain itself is listed, the licence is active, and the trading name matches the brand you are about to deposit with.
• Look at the licensee's other domains and trading names before you finish — that is where a familiar problem often reappears under a new name.