Licence Watch: Where Online Casinos Say They Are Licensed

373 live casinos. 96 verified against the registers. 50 with no regulator at all.

This is the first edition of a register this desk intends to publish every quarter: the licensing picture across every casino currently listed on FreeExtraChips, counted two ways. The first count is what the casinos declare — the licence named in each listing, taken from the operator’s own footer and terms at the time the review was written. The second count is what we have verified ourselves, brand by brand, against the regulator’s own register: a certificate naming the domain, a validator returning the licence number, a licensee entry matching the company in the footer. The two counts are never merged. A declared licence is a claim; a verified one is a fact; this page keeps them in separate columns throughout.

The headline numbers are these. Of 802 casinos this site has listed since 2006, 373 are live today and 429 are closed or suspended — more than half of everything ever listed. Among the 373, Curaçao is the declared licence of 166, more than four in ten; the two regulators that did not exist in this market five years ago, Tobique and Anjouan, now account for 40 between them; fifty live brands name no gambling regulator at all. Against the register we have verified the operator of 96 brands — a quarter of the live catalogue, 32 companies, 28 licences — and that verified layer is where the detail lives: 23 brands on certificate-confirmed Curaçao licences of the new regime, 11 more on licence numbers we have seen but not yet confirmed at the domain, 12 on Tobique, 18 on Anjouan, 9 on Kahnawake, 21 whose operating company is identified but holds no licence we can find, and four expired sub-licence strings from a system that no longer exists, still attached to companies that ran listed casinos.

One correction comes first, because it is ours. Five live listings in our own catalogue declared Curaçao while the operator behind them holds an Anjouan licence; five more carried the label of a jurisdiction dissolved in 2010; and two brands of one affiliate programme were held in our operator register at candidate attributions from August that the regulator’s validator has since replaced. All three groups are corrected with this edition, and the register below counts them as they are, not as they were filed.

How this register is built

The population is every published listing that is neither closed nor suspended on the day of freezing: 373 brands on 9 October 2026. Of the 802 casinos this site has ever reviewed, 429 are closed or suspended and 0 were withdrawn from publication. Casinos we have blacklisted remain in the count while they operate — a blacklist is a verdict on conduct, not a statement that the licence does not exist — and 13 live listings carry that flag.

The declared layer is the licence field of each listing, which records the jurisdictions a brand cites in its own footer or terms. 78 brands cite more than one, and each citation is counted once under its regulator, so the declared figures sum to more than 373. The verified layer is the FEC Operator Atlas — our public register of operating companies, their licences and the brands linked to them — and only links marked as current are counted. A brand enters the verified layer when we have matched it to an operator ourselves; the operator’s licence is then recorded at one of three confidence levels, confirmed, probable or single-source, and every figure on this page says which.

Nothing is inherited. A sibling brand on the same affiliate programme does not acquire its sibling’s licence here, a verified operator does not verify a brand we have not matched to it, and where the two layers disagree the register says so and the listing is corrected, not the register.

Curaçao after the reform

Of the 166 live brands that declare a Curaçao licence, we have verified the operator and the licence for 35: 23 on certificate-confirmed OGL licences held by 7 companies, and 12 on OGL numbers we have seen but not yet pulled from the register, held by 8 companies. The remaining 131 are, for the purposes of this page, claims — not false, not confirmed, and the main item of work between this edition and the next.

Every confirmed licence in the block is a direct licence of the new regime; those with a recorded grant date were granted between 16 July 2024 and 27 August 2025. The structure is the single-licence, multi-domain model the reform produced: one OGL number, several casinos, each domain named individually on the regulator’s certificate portal. That is what makes the model checkable, and what makes a sibling discoverable. It also means a finding at one domain travels: a complaint pattern, a terms clause or a withdrawal cap set at the operator level reaches every casino on the certificate.

The ghosts are the other half of the story: 4 sub-licence strings from the master-licence era remain in our register, marked expired, attached to 4 companies that operated listed brands. The system that issued them has been wound down; the numbers still circulate, in stale footers and in third-party listings that were never updated. The rule this desk applies, and the one worth borrowing, is simple: a Curaçao licence number that does not begin with OGL belongs to a regime that no longer issues or renews licences, and it should be treated as a historical reference until the operator shows a current certificate.

The new rails: Tobique and Anjouan

Two regulators absent from this catalogue a few years ago now cover 40 declared and 28 verified live brands. The verified share is the highest of any regulator on the page, because every brand on either licence arrived there through a migration this desk documented.

Tobique is declared by 13 live brands, of which 12 are verified on 2 licences confirmed on the commission’s validator, which names the licensed domains. Anjouan is declared by 27, and verified behind 16, on 3 confirmed and 2 probable licensees.

Corporate geography

The register records where each operating company is incorporated. Among the operators behind the 96 verified brands: 19 Curaçao companies running 52 brands; 2 Costa Rica companies running 12 brands; 3 Belize companies running 11 brands; 3 Comoros companies running 9 brands; 4 companies with no verified country of incorporation running 9 brands; 1 Malta company running 2 brands. Licence, company and cashier routinely sit in three different places, and only the first of them is a regulator.

Beneath that layer sits a third one. The register holds 16 payment-processing companies that appear in the cashier clauses of the estates we have investigated — the entity named on the card statement, the counterparty for refunds — and 13 of them are incorporated in Cyprus. None of them holds, or needs, a gambling licence.

No gambling regulator

No regulator at all is declared by 40 live listings, because our review found no licence to cite. Costa Rica is declared by 10 more; it has no online-gambling licensing regime, and a company there operates under ordinary business registration, which regulates nothing about the games, the cashier or the handling of a complaint. A single operating group accounts for 9 of the 10. Together, 50 brands — 13 per cent of the live catalogue — are casinos at which the only recourse is the operator itself.

A licence from Mwali, an authority whose register we do not currently pull first-party, is held by 3 brands, recorded here at declared level only. And 13 live listings carry our blacklist flag, 9 of them declaring Curaçao — the reminder this section exists to make: a licence, even a real one, is a floor and not a verdict. The flag rests on documented conduct; the licence column records what the operator holds.

What the desk documented this quarter

The register’s event log begins with this edition, so the quarter is reported from the desk’s own files, each finding dated to the day the regulator’s record was pulled. Five findings shaped the verified layer; three matters stay open.

A two-rail estate was completed in August: nine brands mapped end to end, one operating company confirmed on a Curaçao OGL granted on 27 August 2025, its certificate pulled at the brand domain on 7 August, the other confirmed on an Anjouan licence through the validator at three of its domains in the same week. It is the first estate in the register documented at certificate tier on both of its rails.

On 21 September the operator of one of the sector’s best-known crypto casinos and of a brand launched this spring was certificate-verified on a single Curaçao OGL covering both domains, the two certificates pulled the same day — a clean pair, and a correction to the widely circulated attribution of the flagship to its predecessor operator, now an era out of date.

The nine-brand Tobique estate gained its ninth confirmed member in September, a flagship-era brand running since 2015 whose terms are the freshest in the family; the estate is now documented in full on licence 0000002.

Three listings that declare no regulator were attributed this quarter to one Curaçao company on the strength of two regulators’ own records: the Australian regulator’s formal warnings of July 2022 and April 2023, and a cease-and-desist of 2 April 2025 from the Michigan Gaming Control Board naming the same company for two of the three. No gambling licence has been found for any of them. They sit in the verified layer as an identified operator with no licence on record, which is a different thing from an unverified claim, and the distinction is kept on every table below.

Two brands of one affiliate programme, held since August at candidate attributions — a Kahnawake permit for one, a Curaçao OGL for the other, neither proven at the domain — were resolved by the Anjouan validator to a single operating company on a single licence. The candidates are withdrawn; the listings, which had declared Anjouan all along, no longer disagree with the register.

The open matters are reported as such. A long-running Kahnawake estate of nine brands is in the middle of a corporate restructure: a successor company has been declared as owner while the commission’s permits still sit with the predecessor, and the register will show the transfer when the permits do. The group behind two listings with an empty licence field announced the sale of its business outside its home market to an operator it has not named, effective 6 October; the acquiring company is unidentified, the affiliate programmes did not transfer, the operator links are closed at that date and both listings are under review. And a listing that arrived this autumn declares a Curaçao OGL that the regulator’s registry shows active for the licensee but with no approved domain; it is held at pending until the certificate appears at the brand’s own address.

Licence events logged in the register

• 21 Sep 2026 Other BitStarz and Cashy verified on one CGA licence Gareton B.V. · BitStarz Casino confirmed

  CGA certificates at both domains name Gareton B.V. (reg 160656) on OGL/2024/165/0185; the two brands share the licence and the Starz Partners programme.

Verify it yourself

Every verification on this page was made with public tools, and the same tools are available to any player with five minutes. The rule that governs their use is the one this desk applies everywhere: the footer of the live site, not the badge, the banner or the review you read elsewhere, tells you which company you are contracting with, and the regulator’s own register, not the casino’s own seal, tells you whether that company’s licence covers the domain you are on.

For a Curaçao licence of the new regime, the Gaming Authority’s certificate portal at cert.cga.cw answers by domain: enter the casino’s address and the portal returns the certificate, the licence number and the licensee, or nothing. A number of the form OGL/2024/nnnn/nnnn with no certificate for your domain is not a licence for your domain. For Tobique, the commission’s validator at validate.thetgc.ca names the licensed domains for each licence number. For Anjouan, the seal on the casino’s own page links to the licensing authority’s validator, which returns the registered website and support address for the licence; a seal that links to the casino’s own page, or to nothing, has not validated anything. For Kahnawake, the commission publishes a certificate for each authorised brand; the brand, not only the operator, should appear. For a Maltese licence, the authority’s licensee register enumerates the approved URLs under each licence, and the dynamic seal on a licensed site resolves to that register entry. For a British licence, the public register lists the domains under each account number.

Three outcomes are possible, and only one of them is good. The register names your domain: the licence covers you. The register names the company but not your domain: the licence exists, and does not cover you. The register returns nothing, or a number from a regime that no longer issues licences: treat the casino as unlicensed, whatever the footer says.

The next edition

Every licence fact this desk verifies — a licence granted, a migration, a revocation, a company struck off, a rebrand — is logged in the Operator Atlas as a dated event, and the next edition reports the quarter as a count rather than as a narrative: licences granted and lost, brands moved between regulators, and the two numbers that matter most — how many of the 131 unverified Curaçao claims have been checked, and how many of the 50 brands without a regulator are still listed. The verification queue is set by the figures above: Curaçao claims first, largest estates first, because a single certificate pull verifies every domain on the licence. Any operator that disputes a figure on this page can write to the desk; corrections are made on the page, with the date, and the register is updated, not the other way round.

Bottom line

More than half of the casinos this site has ever listed are gone. Of the 373 that remain, more than four in ten cite a licence label that no longer distinguishes a current licence from an expired one, one in seven cites no regulator at all, and the two regulators growing fastest are ones most players had not heard of three years ago. Against all of that, this desk can state as fact the operator behind 96 brands and the licence behind 62 of them — and for the other 277, this page says “declared” and means it.

That distance is the point of publishing. The declared map is what the market says about itself; the verified layer is what we have checked; the next edition will show whether the second is catching up with the first.

Register frozen on 9 October 2026 — declared figures are the operators’ own statements as recorded in our listings; verified figures are register checks made by this desk at the confidence level stated, from the FEC Operator Atlas and first-party pulls of the Curaçao Gaming Authority certificate portal, the Tobique Gaming Commission validator, the Anjouan licensing authority validator, the Kahnawake Gaming Commission certificates and the Malta Gaming Authority register. Verify the operator entity and licence status on the live site and the regulator’s register before signing up.