We read ten public registers to build our directory. Here is what we learned about what they actually prove - and where they go quiet.
Three things a register can tell you for certain
- Two brands on one licence number are the same operator. Certain. Not similar, not affiliated - the same
- Two companies with the same registration number are the same company. Also certain
- Two companies with similar names are a question. Nothing more. Anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing
And one more rule we hold ourselves to: nothing found means nothing found. It does not mean nothing there.
A licence is not an owner
This is the mistake almost everyone makes. A licence proves who holds the permit. Ownership sits in company registries, and those are a different search in a different country - often one that does not publish shareholders at all.
It gets one layer trickier. A stack of brands on one licence sometimes means one owner with many brands, and sometimes means a white-label provider with many customers. Same picture on the register, completely different meaning.
Where the registers go quiet
Anjouan says valid about licences nobody has looked at. The Authority lists four statuses - Active, Suspended, Revoked, Expired - and says an expired licence means the holder is no longer authorised. When we pulled it in October 2026, all 1,366 rows read valid, including 381 already past their own expiry date. The Revoked and Suspended pages exist, with column headings and no rows. That is as likely to be a small authority behind on its paperwork as anything darker - but valid there does not mean recently checked.
Curacao deletes a revoked licence instead of marking it. It does publish enforcement - 32 actions when we looked, nearly all revocations - but the licence disappears from the live register. So looking the company up afterwards returns nothing, which looks identical to a company that was never licensed at all. That is why our directory folds the enforcement list in: if a regulator pulled a licence, that is the most useful thing anyone can tell you, and the register is the one place you will not find it.
Costa Rica does not issue gambling licences. At all. There is no regulator and no licence number. Companies there hold a municipal patente for data processing - permission to run servers, not a casino. So a site naming a Costa Rican company with no licence number is not hiding one; there isn't one to hide. It still turns up constantly: 316 of the licence holders we hold are named in the Costa Rican format 3-102-XXXXXX, and 247 of those hold Anjouan licences. Costa Rica is where the company lives. The gambling permission comes from somewhere else.
How to check yours in two minutes
- Scroll to the footer and find the licence number and the company name
- Search the number in our casino directory - it holds licence rows from ten registers and will show you what else sits on it
- Compare the company name to the brand. Different is normal. It just tells you which business you are really dealing with
- Check the expiry date if the register publishes one, and treat a passed date as a question worth asking support
The honest version
A third of the licences we hold carry more than one casino. The biggest carries 152. So the odds are decent that the shiny new casino you found is the same company as the one you left last month, with a different logo and the same payments team.
None of that makes a casino bad. It just means the brand is the least informative thing on the page. Check the licence, not the logo.