How to verify an online casino license before you deposit

Check one: what does the footer claim

Scroll to the bottom of the casino's home page and read three items: the regulator it names, the licence number, and the company it says runs the site. Then open the terms and find the clause that names the company again. The footer and the terms must agree on the company; a mismatch is the first tell of a site assembled from someone else's pages.

Note the form of the number. A Curacao number reads OGL or CGA followed by a year and two more groups. An Anjouan number reads ALSI followed by a long digit string and a suffix. A Curacao number in the JAZ form belongs to a master licence that has expired and is not a licence of the casino's own: Fairspin's stored number was one of those, and the brand now holds an Anjouan licence that validates on the regulator's portal. The Curacao guide explains why the old numbers died.

Check two: is the company on the regulator's register

Every serious regulator publishes a register, and the register is the source, not the casino's page. For Curacao it is a PDF from the Curacao Gaming Authority with one row per licence: number, licensee, B2C or B2B, company registration number, issue and expiry dates, status. Search it for the company name from check one, not for the brand name, because the brand is rarely in the register at all. Riobet's row, for example, is the licensee's, with the certificate issued for riobet.com.

Read the status. Indefinite is a full licence. Assessment in progress is a provisional one that rolls forward in six-month windows; Weiss and Betico sit there, and that is a licence, not a lapse. Expired and revoked are the end of the road: Cat's Curacao number is printed as expired, and Cryptoboss, Unlim and Auf shared a number the register shows as revoked at the licensee's request. All four now cite Anjouan instead.

Check three: does the seal open a certificate on the regulator's domain

Click the seal in the footer. A genuine Curacao seal is a green box with CGA in white and opens a certificate on cert.cga.cw, a domain the regulator owns. A genuine Anjouan seal opens a validation page on the Anjouan gaming board's domain with the company, the number and the domain: Duel's seal resolves there showing Immortal Snail LLC, its ALSI number, the domain duel.com and a valid status, and BC Game's seal is tied to bc.game the same way.

Look at the address bar, not the page. A certificate on a lookalike domain with the wrong ending is the pattern readers report most, and the regulator's own warnings describe fake certificates carrying the real seal. If the seal is an image that opens nothing, the check fails.

Check four: is this domain named on the certificate

A licence covers a company and the specific domains the regulator approved for it. The Curacao authority's warning about casinoace.life and three sister domains is the case to remember: the licensee named on those sites was real and licensed, and the domains were not known to it. Checking the company against the register passes; only the certificate naming the exact domain proves the site you are on is covered.

Mirror domains make this matter for Polish readers: a brand blocked on the Ministry of Finance register moves to a new address, and the new address should appear on the certificate too. The mirrors guide shows how to tell a brand's own mirror from a copy.

Check five: does anything else contradict the licence

A licence can be live and still not be the whole story. Winz's home page states a Tobique Gaming Commission licence alongside an Anjouan one, having left Curacao; the review says so instead of repeating the old number. Vodka moved from a Curacao company to a Belize one and an Anjouan licence, which leaves a European player with no regulator to appeal to in practice. Spinbetter's Curacao row sits under assessment with a date already passed while the footer cites Anjouan, so the footer is the current claim.

Where no public register exists, the number is a statement. Cryptoboss's Anjouan number is reported by an aggregator and could not be found on a regulator page, so the review writes that the casino states it. That is the honest form, and the trust mark reflects it.

1. Footer and terms name the same company

   Regulator, number, company: three items, two places, one answer.

2. The company is on the register with a live status

   Indefinite or assessment in progress; B2C, not B2B.

3. The seal opens the regulator's domain

   cert.cga.cw for Curacao, the Anjouan board's validator for Anjouan.

4. The certificate names your domain

   The exact address in the bar, mirror included.

5. No contradiction elsewhere

   Owner changes, second licences, dead numbers still printed by aggregators.

What a pass and a fail mean for the trust mark

A brand passing all five gets the full trust mark on its review; a brand failing the register or the seal is capped, and the review says which check failed. That is what the score on the reviews hub is built on. The compare tool lists licence and number side by side so you can run check two on the whole catalogue at once.

A pass does not promise a fast payout, and the licence tells you nothing about the cashier. It promises a company that exists, a regulator that can be written to, and a domain that the regulator knows. For an offshore brand, that is the floor, and it is the floor most fakes fall through.